Mexico might host key climate change conference in 2010
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Mexico might host a conference that could lead to a deal replacing the Kyoto Protocol if December's meeting in Copenhagen fails to do so, Mexico's Environment Minister Juan Rafael Elvira Quesada said Thursday.
"If Copenhagen misses the goal and Mexico is chosen as the host for 2010, maybe this will be the place where the decision is made," Elvira Quesada told a session on climate change at Mexico Civil Engineering College.
He added that the international community was seeking to limit the concentration of carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere, the world's most common greenhouse gas, to 400 parts per million (ppm). At present, the global CO2 concentration is 350 ppm.
The European Union, Mexico and a few others are committed to policies that will bring about substantial greenhouse gas cuts, but other groups like the G77, which includes most African and Asian nations, are unwilling to make a move without commitments from major gas-emitting nations.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon proposed a Green Fund plan as an attempt to solve this conflict. Under the plan, the world's richest nations would create a 10-billion-U.S. dollar fund administered by the World Bank, and nations would be awarded by the fund depending on their gas emission reductions.
Earlier in the day, Dr. Polioptero Martinez, who leads the state-run Mexican Water Technology Agency, warned that some parts of Mexico faced average temperature changes of 4 degrees Celsius this century, four times the change that wiped out Mexico's most successful pre-Colombian civilization, the Maya.
"We need the big boys to make changes," he said on the sidelines of the conference. "Mexico only produces 2 percent of the world's greenhouse gases. Even if we halve that to 1 percent, it is not going to change the world."
