Russia puts heat on climate treaty

Russia has a key role to play in global warming talks

By the BBC's Elizabeth Blunt in Marrakech

Delegates to a UN meeting on climate change in the Moroccan city of Marrakech are pressing on with their discussions to finalise the details of the Kyoto Protocol.

This is the international treaty under which industrialised countries would commit themselves to legally-binding cuts in their emissions of the gases which are believed by many scientists to be warming the planet.

But one country which could yet block agreement is Russia, which is playing a key role now that the United States is no longer part of the negotiations.

The moment President Bush decided the United States would stay outside the protocol, Russia stepped into the spotlight.

After the US, it is listed as the next biggest producer of greenhouse gases in the industrialised world. If neither Russia nor the United States take part, the whole plan will collapse.

Substantial concessions were already made to Russia in the last round of talks in Bonn in July.

Forest sinks

Russia was allowed to argue that its vast forests soaked up at least 17 million metric tonnes of carbon a year, thus sparing it the need to reduce its use of coal and oil by that amount.

But now the Russian delegation is asking for further concessions, and threatening not to ratify the agreement unless the allowance for its forests is almost doubled.

In his formal statement, the Russian representative talked grandly of using national potential and creating incentives for sustainable development. But other delegates are calling it blackmail.

The spokesman for the developing countries said that Russia's demands were definitely far too high. But it looks as if Russia will get an increase in the allowance that it can claim for its forests, just in the interests of keeping it inside the agreement.

The problem is that every extra tonne of carbon on the allowance allows the burning of an equivalent amount of coal and oil, and that giving way to Russia could open the floodgates to claims from other countries.