Rich countries failing in climate pledges: India

INDIA: India blasted rich countries at the UN climate talks on Thursday, accusing them of snubbing scientists' warnings to slash their emissions of greenhouse gases by 40 percent by 2020 over 1990 levels.

India's special envoy, Shyam Saran, said efforts to complete a new climate pact in Copenhagen this December hinged on advanced economies delivering "clarity" on the scale of their emissions cuts.

And he cautioned them against any attempt to shift the base year of 1990 which is traditionally used in the world climate talks.

"There has been hardly any progress on achieving the key objective of our negotiations... which must be of a scale that must be equal to the scale we face from global climate change," Saran said at a news conference in Bonn.

"Some individual targets that have been indicated fall far short of what is required, and there are inadmissible attempts to abandon the agreed baseline for emissions reductions," he said.

"A Copenhagen outcome without clarity on this important issue is unlikely."

Saran's remarks touched on the most intractable issue in the climate talks, whose latest 12-day round wraps up in Bonn on Friday.

He refused to name names, but his fire seemed clearly aimed at the United States and Japan, the world's second and fourth biggest greenhouse-gas emitters. Bonn, Germany, Monday, AFP