Japan Press Weekly

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2008 October 29 - November 4 [ENVIRONMENT]

Japan should not participate in COP14 agreement if the U.S. does not, states MOFA official

A senior Foreign Ministry official in charge of climate change talks said that getting the United States and China to participate in the agreement is the foremost important task of the talks and that Japan should not participate in a new agreement if the United States does not.

Sugiyama Shinsuke, director-general for Global Affairs of the Japanese Foreign Ministry, made the remarks at a symposium on “Japan-U.S. Cooperation” held in Washington on October 23. The statement was based on the official Japanese government position on the 14th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP14) scheduled for December in Poznan, Poland.

Sugiyama’s statement suggests that Japan will compromise its independent position in order to follow the United States on the issue of climate change.

The prevention of global warming is a universal task that calls for every country to do its utmost.

There is no denying that it is important for the U.S. and China, both major emitters of greenhouse gases, to participate in the new climate change agreement to go into effect after 2013, succeeding the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012. However, their participation must be achieved after taking all necessary steps in line with all the past international agreements.

In order to make a success of the negotiations, the developed countries such as Japan and the United States, which are most responsible for global warming, should voluntarily set their ambitious goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and make every possible effort to achieve them.

What Sugiyama stated is that Japan’s reduction target as well as its effort to achieve the goal depends on what the next U.S. administration will say, and that Japan puts China in the same light as the United States, the country which has an historical responsibility for exacerbating the present extent of global warming.

As long as Japan takes such a stance, it will not be able to persuade China and will only help frustrate future negotiations.

The Japanese government has so far explained that it cannot come up with its own target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions because it is a negotiating card.

Sugiyama, however, admitted that if the U.S. government has not established a policy on global warming prevention, Japan cannot work out a policy on that issue, either.

If Japan clings to this attitude, it can never take on an international initiative to meaningfully address the issue of global warming.