Special Report: Fight against Global Warming

    BALI, Indonesia, Dec. 15 (Xinhua) -- The World Wild Fund for Nature,(WWF), a global environmental conservation organization, said Saturday that the Bali Roadmap adopted at the end of a two-week U.N. climate conference fell short in its ambition and "weak on substance".

    WWF said in a press release following the meeting that political leaders meeting for the U.N.'s climate change conference will start formal negotiations with a 2009 end date, but the deal fell short in its ambition.

    The Bali Roadmap was a deal " weak on substance", WWF said. "The U.S. administration was asked to get out of the way, and in the end they bowed to pressure," said Hans Verolme, Director of WWF 's Global Climate Change Program.

    "The Bali Roadmap leaves a seat at the table for the next U.S. president to make a real contribution to the global fight to stop dangerous climate change, "WWF said.

    WWF urged industrialized countries to agree to deep emission cuts, and to leverage new funding and support for technology transfer, finance and adaptation over the next two years.

    The EU and leading developing countries will have to propose a work plan for this two-year negotiation marathon. These talks will have to make up for Bali's shortcomings, it said.

    WWF also praised progress the meeting made on some of the practical building blocks of a future climate change regime, including technology transfer, adaptation and financial incentives. Over 11,000 delegates from over 187 countries gathered in Bali, a resort island of Indonesia, for the U.N. climate meeting, which aims to launch negotiations on a new climate regime before the current phase of the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

    The protocol binds 36 industrialized countries to cut emissions by an average 5 percent below the 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012. The final text of the Bali Roadmap dropped the EU' favored deep cut of emissions by 25-40 percent goal for rich countries by 2020 due to the opposition of the United States, Japan and Canada. The findings of the Fourth Assessment Report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that to keep the world below 2 degrees centigrade warming compared with pre-industrial times, global emissions need to peak and decline before 2020.