Interesting perspectives from different participants on the meetings.
Editorial: What others say
Published 12:00 am PDT Monday, June 18, 2007
Finding a global warming deal
The principal topic at the recent Group of Eight (G-8) summit held in Heiligendamm, Germany, was neither currencies nor conflict.
Instead, the leaders of the world's richest industrial nations focused on global warming, which threatens all of mankind. They recognized the seriousness of the threat and agreed to take urgent, concerted actions to deal with it.
The United States had turned its back on the Kyoto treaty and was reluctant before the meeting in Heiligendamm to embrace any numerical target. The fact that the United States was eventually persuaded into accepting a reference to the emissions target in the G-8 joint statement has great significance.
The G-8 communique also clearly reaffirmed the U.N. role as the primary arena for climate diplomacy.
The G-8's success in extracting Washington's commitment to working under the U.N. framework has huge implications for future negotiations in the post-Bush era. What emerged from the gathering in Heiligendamm puts the onus on Japan to make sure that next year's G-8 summit in Hokkaido produces a comprehensive vision for a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.
The post-Kyoto treaty needs to bind major developing countries like China and India to specific obligations to trim their greenhouse emissions. The U.S. agreement to take part in negotiations to develop a new climate pact has opened up the possibility that China and India will also make concessions.
-- Asahi Shimbun (Tokyo)
The G-8 compromise
When they met two years ago at Gleneagles, leaders of the G-8 pledged $50 billion in development aid for Africa. They promised treatment to all Africans suffering from HIV/Aids by the end of the decade. ... At their summit in Germany, the leaders said they would get treatment to 5 million people with the disease, around half the total number of victims. They restated the 2005 aid pledge, a tacit acknowledgment that they had failed to honor their original commitment. It is easy to be skeptical.
Poverty was not made history at Gleneagles.
But that doesn't mean this year's meeting was a failure. ...
Leaders of the industrialized world might only have grasped the importance of acting on those issues once they saw that it served their long-term interests, but that is still progress. ...
Seen from that perspective, it is remarkable how global aid issues have crossed over, in a few years, from protesters' placards on one side of the security cordon to the formal agenda of politicians on the other side. The Gleneagles meeting might have raised hopes that were unrealistic, but it changed the culture of G-8 summitry for the better. Tony Blair deserves some credit for that.
Credit is due also to German Chancellor Angela Merkel for forging something like consensus on climate change last week. At the start of the summit, George W. Bush was hostile to Ms. Merkel's ambitious targets for cutting carbon emissions and opposed to any future deal on the environment that would be run under U.N. auspices.
Now, in principle at least, he has signed up for both. The hard work on global emissions cuts has yet to come. ... But a significant barrier -- Mr. Bush's phobia of anything that looked like the Kyoto protocol -- has been removed. ...
Seen from the perspective of Gleneagles, and the high hopes of the anti-poverty campaign, (the) summit was a disappointment.
But it is worth pausing for historical perspective, remembering how the world's economic power brokers used to do business. That longer view gives real grounds for optimism.
-- The Observer (London)
