Australia announced climate change assistance for Indonesia as it urged UN-led talks in Mexico to move beyond process disputes and make progress.
Australia on Thursday said it was allocating $A45 million for Indonesia, largely to help the neighbouring country set up measures for efforts to save forests — a major way to offset industrial pollution.
The funding is part of a $A599 million package Australia earlier announced as part of “fast-track” funding — the climate assistance which wealthy nations have pledged to offer developing countries immediately.
“Australia is delivering on fast-start,” Climate Change Minister Greg Combet said in an address to the meeting of more than 190 countries at the Mexican beach resort of Cancun.
“Too often we allow ourselves to be distracted by process issues and by negotiating tactics,” he said.
“It is time now to refocus on the major task at hand. It is imperative for the credibility of this process that we are able to make progress here,” he said, pledging that Australia will “continue to make every effort.”
Combet said Australia was “flexible” on a dispute hanging over the Cancun talks on the future of the Kyoto Protocol, whose requirements for wealthy nations to cut carbon emissions runs out at the end of 2012.
Faced with the likelihood that no new treaty will be ready soon, the European Union has led calls to extend the Kyoto Protocol.
Japan, backed by Canada and Russia, has led opposition. Japan says Kyoto is unfair by making no demands of top polluters China, which has no requirements as a developing nation, and the United States, which rejected the treaty.
Australia, which emits more carbon per capita than any other large country, was a late entrant to the Kyoto Protocol. It joined the treaty after the Labor Party defeated the conservative government in 2007.
