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Independent (UK): Following is a snapshot of the main players in the global climate talks, ahead of the December 7-18 conference in Copenhagen. GROUP OF 77 AND CHINA The bloc of developing nations insist rich countries - deemed responsible for today's warming and best placed to tackle it - commit to legally-binding reductions of their emissions by at least 40 percent annually by 2020 over 1990 levels. They refuse to make binding emissions targets of their own, arguing that they need to ...

Independent (UK): The December 7-18 UN climate conference in Copenhagen is tasked with framing a new deal for tackling global warming and its impacts beyond 2012. Here is a factfile on the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Kyoto Protocol and the talks. UNFCCC The offshoot of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the UNFCCC provides a planetary arena for tackling climate change. It came into force on March 21 1994. The treaty has been ratified by 192 countries. Governments swap ...

Guardian: In two weeks' time, seven-year-old Gabriel Anderson will be in the centre of Copenhagen, climbing on to a step to address the crowds at the end of another Performance Family Picnic. Gabriel, his brothers Sid (the family's two-year-old "head of research") and Neal, nine, plus his parents, artists and lecturers Gary Anderson and Lena Simic, make up the Institute of the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home, a one-family protest unit from Liverpool who take their picnic rugs and perform at ...

Associated Press: The world's leaders must prioritize the issue of global warming above all else, the Dalai Lama said Monday, adding that he feels encouraged by next month's climate change summit in Copenhagen. The revered Buddhist figure and Nobel Peace Prize winner, in Australia for a series of lectures on universal responsibility and the environment, said politicians must focus their energy on finding a solution to climate change. "Sometimes their number one importance is national interest, ...

Inter Press Service: For a long time, activists had believed that rainforests in the vast northwest Borneo state of Sarawak were being logged unsustainably, rapidly making way for tree (acacia) plantations, oil palm plantations, dams and secondary growth. But few listened. Their position was confirmed when the country's auditor-general presented to Parliament last month its 2008 annual report criticising forestry management in Malaysia's largest state as "unsatisfactory". Earlier this month Sarawak state ...

Business Green: France's nuclear watchdog has expressed concern over the loss of skills in the atomic energy industry after a near 20-year gap in building reactors. In an interview with the Financial Times, André-Claude Lacoste, head of the French Nuclear Safety Authority, said: "The relaunch of construction, and monitoring that relaunch, are not simple. We have to regain experience. We have not built reactors for more than 15 years.' Lacoste said this issue was preoccupying all ...

Agence France-Presse: Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was heading to Washington Sunday for key talks with US President Barack Obama to be dominated by climate change and the conflict in Afghanistan. Rudd will arrive fresh from a Commonwealth summit in Trinidad where he helped steer a landmark declaration backing moves to draw up a legally binding pact to fight global warming at climate talks in Copenhagen. Obama will host the Australian prime minister, whose country is a key member of the ...

Xinhua: Trinidadian Prime Minister Patrick Manning Sunday formally declared closed the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) on Sunday in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago. He said that Australia would be the next nation to host the CHOGM, which will take place in 2011, then Sri Lanka in 2013 and finally African nation Mauritius in 2015. Manning said that the meeting had managed to reach agreement on six documents: a communiqu, agreements on the four key ...

Associated Press: European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso is urging China and other countries to make more ambitious commitments on curbing heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions. Barroso welcomed fresh emission pledges by China and plans by both Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and U.S. President Barack Obama to attend next month's U.N. conference on climate change in Copenhagen. "Everyone is committing," Barroso told reporters after dining Sunday with Wen. "We have to see at the end if all ...

Seattle Post Intelligencer: Computer hackers recently penetrated the server at the University of East Anglia in Britain, and caught academics in the Climate Research Unit in gossipy conversation about how to discredit global warming critics. Right-wing media have extracted quotes, cried "Junk Science," jazzed up a buzzword -- "Climategate" -- with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times headlining an editorial: "Hiding evidence of global cooling." It's a classic example of Junk Propaganda. The klutzy ...

Guardian: There is "virtually no possibility" of a few scientists biasing the advice given to governments by the UN's top global warming body, its chair said today. Rajendra Pachauri defended the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the wake of apparent suggestions in emails between climate scientists at the University of East Anglia that they had prevented work they did not agree with from being included in the panel's fourth assessment report, which was published in ...

Associated Press: Twenty years ago, when the Iron Curtain came down, the world gagged in horror as it witnessed firsthand the ravages inflicted on nature by the Soviet industrial machine. Throughout the crumbling communist empire, sewage and chemicals clogged rivers; industrial smog choked cities; radiation seeped through the soil; open pit mines scarred green valleys. It was hard to measure how bad it was and still is: The focus was more on production quotas than environmental data. Today, ...

Reuters: An Australian project tapping Aborigines' knowledge to avert devastating wildfires that stoke climate change is the world's best example of linking indigenous peoples to carbon markets, the U.N. University said on Sunday. Other parts of the world, especially Africa, could also tap centuries-old local practices to help slow deforestation that releases heat-trapping carbon dioxide. In return, local peoples could get jobs and cash from carbon markets, it said. A project backed by ...

Agence France-Presse: India's chief climate change negotiator has flatly rejected taking on emission reduction targets a day after Premier Manmohan Singh said the country would commit to cuts conditionally. India, one of the world's top greenhouse gas emitters, has yet to offer figures on reining in its carbon output, with just over a week to go until UN climate talks start in Copenhagen. Singh said on Saturday that India was "willing to sign on to an ambitious global target for emissions reductions ...

Agence France-Presse: A group of developing nations has agreed a common position in a bid to pressure rich countries during crunch climate talks in Copenhagen after low-key talks in China, state media said Sunday. Representatives from China, India, Brazil, South Africa and Sudan, which currently chairs the Group of 77 developing countries, met in Beijing Friday and Saturday, the official People's Daily newspaper reported. They agreed to ask "developed countries to assume responsibility for emissions ...