As Tony Blair concludes discussions with George W. Bush in Washington on climate change and poverty in Africa, Benito Mueller argues on openDemocracy that the UK, along with the rest of Europe, Russia and Japan should stick with the Kyoto Protocol, and even to open it up to sub-state actors in non-Parties like the US and Australia.

For developing countries, he says, climate change is not only a matter of mitigation or adaptation; it is a crosscutting issue of disaster management, desertification, biodiversity, trade, and, above all, development.

Mueller says the points in finding a way forward for an international climate regime beyond 2012 are:

* resist attempts to force climate change into a ghetto and ensure that issues of adaptation and impacts are not driven off-stage in the course of negotiating a post-2012 mitigation regime

* keep the Kyoto-track (i.e. differentiated mandatory emission caps & flexibilities) negotiations for industrialised countries

* make provisions for “as-if-Parties” who are willing (and able) to play by the rules of the treaty but have not managed to (or cannot) get formal ratification by their governments

* engage developing countries by addressing their emissions without imposing additional economic burdens.

(full text here)

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