U.N. urges climate action

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

BONN, Germany (Reuters) - The United Nations urged far tougher action to fight global warming on Monday at a 166-nation conference split over how far to trumpet bleak U.N. climate reports that outline rising risks.

"Deep emissions cuts by industrialised countries are needed," Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, told 1,000 government officials at the start of the May 7-18 talks in a Bonn hotel about how to slow warming.

De Boer also said poorer nations should get more involved in fighting climate change, especially big emitters, and that developing nations should get incentives to take part.

Negotiators will try to break gridlock in talks on widening action to brake global warming beyond the end of the first period of the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol in 2012 amid growing public concern about climate change.

But delegates split over how far to publicise U.N. studies this year that clearly blame human activities, led by burning fossil fuels, for stoking global warming and outline threats including more heatwaves, storms, droughts and rising seas.

The United States and China, the two top emitters of greenhouse gases, opposed a U.N. proposal on Monday to present the reports at the start of a next annual meeting of the world's environment ministers in Bali, Indonesia, in December.

PRESSURE

Diplomats said the U.N. proposal was aimed at upping pressure for action. "Countries opposed to doing much on global warming don't want the reports at Bali because it would highlight how little they're doing," one European diplomat said.