By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
OSLO (Reuters) - Japan and Russia should publish 2020 goals for greenhouse gas emissions to help spur U.N. talks on a new climate treaty, the head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat said on Monday.
Other developed nations have already set targets and the lack of Japanese and Russian data was holding up the June 1-12 talks among 181 nations in Bonn, Germany, on a new pact due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December.
"A number of critical ... ones are missing -- Japan and Russia," Yvo de Boer told a webcast news conference about progress in the talks on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the existing U.N. pact for curbing emissions.
"It's really important now to get those remaining numbers on the table."
Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso aims to publish a 2020 goal for emissions in the coming days. Options outlined by experts range from a rise of 4 percent over 1990 levels to a cut of 25 percent. Russia has not said when it plans to issue numbers.
"There is a significant lack of progress in the Kyoto process, the key numbers are still missing, that that is slowing down the debate," de Boer said. Russia is the world's number three greenhouse gas emitter, Japan number five.
Developing nations say that all developed nations should publish 2020 goals by June 17 -- six months before the end of the Copenhagen conference.
They also want the rich to outline an aggregate goal for cuts by 2020 to help avert what a U.N. panel of scientists says will be disruptions to crops, water supplies, rising sea levels and extinctions of animals and plant species.
FOSSIL FUELS
Kyoto binds 37 industrialized nations to cut emissions by at least 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12 as a first legally binding step to rein in emissions of greenhouse gases mainly from burning fossil fuels.
De Boer said the Bonn talks were progressing better on a separate track looking at new action for nations with no 2012 Kyoto goals -- developing nations such as China and India and the United States, the only developed nation outside Kyoto.
"Countries are constructively engaged," he said.
But he said Bonn was "not doing very well" on a common goal of finding new funds to confront global warming. Existing cash, partly to help developing nations curb emissions, was far short of estimated costs of up to $250 billion a year by 2020, he said.
De Boer said new emissions pledges so far by Kyoto nations amounted to overall cuts of between 17 and 26 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, excluding the impact of changes in land use. Promises so far cover Australia, Belarus, Canada, the European Union, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Ukraine.
China says developed nations should cut by at least 40 percent by 2020 below 1990 levels. And India presented a paper in Bonn saying that cuts by rich nations should total 79.2 percent by 2020 -- based on historical responsibility for emissions since the Industrial Revolution, de Boer said.
