Kyoto Protocol needs to continue: UN climate chief

BARCELONA. November 4. KAZINFORM While the latest round of UN climate change talks is going on here in Spain on Nov. 2-6, Yvede Boer, the UN climate chief, said on Tuesday that the Kyoto Protocol needed to continue and industrialized countries should come up with more ambitious targets on emission reduction under the protocol; Kazinform refers to Xinhua.
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"Until the moment the Kyoto Protocol is the only thing we have," De Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said in an exclusive interview with Xinhua.

"There is a saying in my language that if you only have one pair of shoes, don't throw them away before you have new ones," said De Boer, "so at the moment Kyoto is my shoes and I would like to keep them on until I know there are something better for me to have. "

He said industrialized countries had to do more to fight climate change and come with more ambitious targets according to the Kyoto Protocol.

De Boer said the international scientific community through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that to avoid the worst impact of climate change, industrialized countries needed to reduce their emissions by between 25 percent and 40 percent by 2020.

"And the targets on the table now are not yet in that range. Sowe need to raise the level of ambition of industrialized countries," he said.

And, this is one of the two biggest problems facing negotiators at the UN climate change talks and the other is climate finance, he added.

"I think, first of all, that we are not yet seeing emission targets from industrialized countries that are ambitious enough. Secondly, we do not announce on the question of finance, how significant finance is going to be mobilized." he said.

In the view of the UN climate chief, these two biggest problems are very closely interrelated and need guidance from world leaders in order to get a solution; Kazinform cites Xinhua.

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