Hundreds of carbon inspectors would be appointed to check countries’ claims about their greenhouse gas emissions.
This would be under a plan to prevent cheating and build confidence in national reduction targets.
The proposal is to be debated at the UN climate change conference at Cancun, Mexico, where suspicions about false claims on emissions and different reporting standards are undermining efforts to reach a global deal.
The inspectors would visit each country and hold hearings at which they would question officials about claims made in national reports on emissions.
But they are unlikely to have powers to carry out inspections of power stations and other large sources of emissions to verify claims about the type and quantity of fuel used.
The inspectors, including scientists and accountants, would be nominated by the countries involved in the negotiations and seconded to work for a subsidiary body of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Jonathan Pershing, the US deputy special envoy for climate change, said a robust monitoring system was essential to build trust in any international agreement on cutting emissions.
It was important to understand what countries were doing, he said. “How can you create confidence in the process? The best way to do that is to have procedures in which that becomes transparent.”
The slow-moving negotiations in Cancun suffered a setback when Japan said it wanted to abandon the Kyoto Protocol after 2012. The protocol commits leading developed countries, with the exception of the US, to emission reduction targets. Kyoto is due to be reviewed in 2012, when countries are supposed to adopt more ambitious targets.
Friends of the Earth said Japan had thrown down an obstacle at Cancun, where the future of the protocol was part of a complex, interlinked haggle.
In an argument it has repeated for nearly a year, Japan said Kyoto’s targeted carbon constraints were unfair and ineffective in present arrangements for tackling global warming.
They applied only to rich countries, but not the US, which abandoned the treaty in 2001, nor to China, the world’s No 1 polluter, a developing country. As a result, only 30 per cent of planet-wide emissions of greenhouse gases were covered.
“With this position, Japan isolates itself from the rest of the world,” said Yuri Onodera of Friends of the Earth Japan.
