Science Story

08 January 2009 20:20 BST

Rich nations 'could pay poor for CO2 cuts'

Rich nations should be allowed to pay poorer countries to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions rather than targeting their own, a senior UN climate official has claimed.

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat (UNCCS), suggested that richer countries should be allowed to buy up to 100 per cent of their emission reduction targets.

His comments coincide with negotiations about the shape of a new protocol on climate change to replace the Kyoto protocol when it finishes in 2012.

The current agreement allows richer countries to buy 'carbon credits', but states that most reductions must come from within the country itself.

Commenting on his proposal, Mr de Boer said: "It's a very sensible part of the solution in the sense that ultimately the climate, the atmosphere, doesn't care where the emission is reduced, as long as it is reduced.

"But for economic reasons you want to find the cheapest reasons in the market."

He explained that developed nations have been reducing CO2 emissions for a long time, making it expensive to attempt to reduce them even more.

"But in developing countries less has been done to reduce emissions and less has been done to address energy efficiency," he told the Today programme.

"It actually becomes economically quite attractive for a company… that has got a target to achieve that target by, for example, reducing emissions in China. And that's where the resource transfer happens."

Friends of the Earth (FoE) has dismissed Mr de Boer's comments, saying they do not make "environmental, economic or political sense".

"Emissions need to go down in industrialised countries if we are going to get to grips with climate change," said FoE climate campaigner Robin Webster.

"We simply don't have the option of buying our way out of trouble. Rich and poor nations need to work together – the longer we leave it to take action the more damaging it will be to our economy and the environment."

And Sir John Houghton, the former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said although it is a "good idea" to do some carbon trading, "the problem will not be solved that way because there is an enormous moral imparity on the rich nations".

"We have grown rich because we have used cheap energy from coal, oil and gas over more than 100 years. It is only recently we have realised the damage we are causing, and that damage falls disproportionately on poorer nations," he told the Today programme.

"So we have to do a great deal more than just trying to buy our way out of it in the way Mr de Boer is suggesting."