A “scaling up” of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) may be the vital ingredient of a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol, a key UN climate official said.

The annual meeting of signatory nations to the UN climate convention and the Kyoto Protocol meet in Nairobi next week with the tough talking to begin on what should take over from Kyoto when it expires in 2012.

The big challenges are how to achieve agreement among developing nations to commit to some form emissions reduction or containment targets, and also the US, the world’s largest emitter and along with Australia makes up the only two developed countries not to ratify Kyoto.

Developing countries say why should they pay the cost of reducing emissions before all the rich countries who created the problem over the past two centuries do their bit. This would hamper their economic development at a time when they are trying to lift their people out of poverty.

The US and Australia say why should they penalise their domestic economies when large emitters like China and India don’t have to.

The CDM, where rich countries and their companies pay for emissions reducing investment in clean technology in the developing world, may hold the answer. If developing nations were set targets, and the developed world given the incentive to pay to help meet them, then everyone might be happy.

"The key term you'll be hearing in Nairobi is scaling up," said Michael Zammit Cutajar, head of a  UN forum set up to explore possible ways forward post-Kyoto. "If we're heading to a much more energetic and ambitious emission reduction strategy beyond 2012 there'll have to be a bigger CDM," Reuters reports Zammit saying.

Another UN official, Janos Pasztor, envisaged that the emission reduction tonnage so far in the pipeline under the CDM being multiplied twenty times under such a plan. "Potentially it could be much, much bigger," Pasztor said. "I don't see any inherent problem scaling up. All of this is feasible, let it come."

Proposals to incorporate carbon dioxide capture and underground storage, as well as avoded deforestation, in the CDM are also expected to be addressed.

Reuters 1/11/06