Falklands greenhouse gases spark row

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

BONN, Germany (Reuters) - Twenty-five years after losing the Falklands War, Argentina accused London at a U.N. climate conference on Thursday of wrongly counting the islands' greenhouse gases in its national data.

The U.N. talks are examining ways to cut emissions. Argentina's protest was a rare example of a country trying to increase them.

"The Malvinas are part of our national territory and the United Kingdom is reporting emissions that shouldn't be in their accounts," Argentine delegate Mariana Alvarez Rodriguez told Reuters on the sidelines of 166-nation talks in Bonn.

Falklands emissions include the 2,900 islanders' use of fossil fuels and emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, from the digestive tracts of flocks of sheep.

Britain has ruled the Falkland Islands since 1833. Argentina's military dictatorship invaded the South Atlantic islands, known as the Malvinas in Spanish, in April 1982. Its forces were defeated after a 10-week campaign.

Alvarez said Britain, with a population of about 60 million, had included the islands in three recent submissions to the United Nations about greenhouse gases and had widened the application of the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol on curbing emissions to include the Falklands.

She said the U.N. General Assembly had agreed that governments should add footnotes about international disputes in such tables of data. "They didn't do it," she said.

One British table lists emissions in overseas territories the Falklands, Cayman Islands, Bermuda and Monserrat at 0.4 million tonnes in 2004. It includes no reference to Argentina's claims.