Thwarts Bid To Put Onus On Developing Nations India may have won the first round at Bali in December 2007 but the UN meeting on climate change at Bonn from June 2-13 saw the developed countries try to alter the Bali agenda. India, along with the G-77 grouping, had to fight hard in the subsidiary meeting to defend the Bali roadmap.

Japan will launch an experimental carbon trading scheme for industry this autumn, Yasuo Fukuda, prime minister, said yesterday as he announced a pledge to cut Japanese greenhouse gas emissions by 60-80 per cent by 2050. In a speech laying out Japan's position on climate change ahead of a summit of the Group of Eight leading economies next month, Mr Fukuda, the meeting's host, said the world needed to "sever its reliance on fossil fuels" and "make a decisive turn toward a low-carbon society".

Hong Kong companies that reduce their carbon dioxide emissions in the city can now sell those cutbacks in a $12.9bn global carbon credit market created under the Kyoto protocol. The new arrangements, announced by the Hong Kong government yesterday, are a step towards rectifying an anomaly created by China's "one country, two systems" rule over its special administrative region. Under this rule, Hong Kong companies are treated no differently from foreign companies when doing business in China.

China and India are increasingly keen to be seen to be tackling climate change; though it is dirtier, China is making a more convincing show of action

A deal to be done between rich and poor countries on global warming is going begging

Global Warming as we all know is one of the serious environmental issues resulting from Green House Effect. Out of all Green House Gases (GHGs), carbon dioxide is the most significant one as its concentration in the atmosphere is increasing at an alarming rate. The most interesting aspect of the GHGs is that they allow the incoming solar radiations to come to earth, but do not allow the longer wavelength radiations of the earth to go up. These are reflected back to the earth surface. As a result the earth's surface temperature is getting warmer.

Sustaining forest health is critical for sustaining livelihoods, conserving biodiversity, producing biomass and protecting watersheds and river valley systems Prof N H Ravindranath

Rich and poor countries argued over how the West can deploy know-how to fight climate change in developing countries but not lose jobs at a UN-run climate conference in Germany on Tuesday. Poorer nations want the West to help them cut their emissions of planet-warming gases and prepare for climate change such as rising seas and more extreme weather because historically the rich are most responsible for those emissions.

The Turkish government has decided to approve the Kyoto Protocol. the UN-led global climate pact, and will send a bill on the issue to parliament shortly, a government spokesman said on Monday. The Kyoto Protocol binds 37 industrialised countries to limits on their greenhouse gases compared to 1990 levels. More than 170 nations have ratified the pact, which came into force in 2005 and Turkey is one of the few countries to have failed to do so.

If the devil is in the details, climate change negotiators are about to enter purgatory. On Monday, some 2,000 delegates from 162 countries and dozens of specialist agencies open a two-week conference, the first to get into the nuts and bolts of a new global warming agreement meant to take effect after 2012. The meeting builds on a landmark accord reached last December on the Indonesian island of Bali which, for the first time, held out the promise that the USA, China and India will join a coordinated effort to control carbon emissions blamed for the unnatural heating of the Earth.