BALI: The future of the planet may be at stake. Delegates from 190 countries gather on the resort island of Bali in coming days to try to head off a scientific forecast of catastrophic floods and droughts, melting ice caps, disappearing coastlines and deadly heat waves.

As they begin negotiations on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012, they will largely tinker with and test phrasings and nuance. Some words such as ‘commitments’, ‘binding’ and ‘voluntary’, could set off storms of argument before the conference ends on Dec 14.

But that is to be expected when drawing together nations rich and poor with very different political and historical backgrounds, said Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environmental Programme, adding that the main thing is that dialogue is taking place.

“We are in the midst of an unprecedented and historic challenge,” he said, adding that attendees will “confront a fundamental phenomena of environmental change that has the potential to threaten the global economy. ... It is central to the future development of this planet.”Last month in Spain, a Nobel Prize-winning UN network of scientists issued a capstone report after six years of study saying that carbon and other heat-trapping ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions must stabilise by 2015 and then decline.

Without action, they said, temperatures will rise, changing the world.

The Arctic ice cap melted this year by the greatest extent on record. Scientists say oceans are losing some ability to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide, the chief industrial emission blamed for warming. And the world’s power plants, cars and jetliners are spewing out carbon at an unprecedented rate.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who will attend the last three days of the conference, said last month that he believes “we are on the verge of a catastrophe if we do not act.”

He has made combating climate change one of his top priorities since taking the reins of the world body on Jan 1, recently visiting a fast-warming corner of icy Antarctica, receding glaciers in Chile and the jungles of the Amazon.

“He feels we need a breakthrough in Bali as a critical first step,” said Michele Montas, the secretary-general’s spokeswoman. “If we are to meet the challenge of global warming, we need a new and comprehensive agreement that all nations can embrace.”

But while everyone risks being affected by rising temperatures, the future lies largely in the hands of a few major carbon emitters.

The United States has long said it would not sign any treaty that calls for mandatory emissions cuts and showed no sign of budging ahead of the meeting, while China and India have said any measures impinging on their booming economies or ability to lift millions out of poverty were unacceptable.

Together the three nations will account for more than half the world’s total carbon emissions by 2015, said Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency.

“If we cannot find a way to get China, India and the US on board, we will have no chance of addressing the climate change issue,” he said. “It will be out of the question.”

The Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 annex to the 1992 UN climate treaty, requires 36 industrial nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an average 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2010.

The United States and Australia were the only major industrial nations to reject the pact, arguing its relatively modest cutbacks would damage their economies and that quotas should have been imposed on poor but fast-developing countries.

But in Bali, the Americans will stand alone. Australian Prime Minister-elect Kevin Rudd, whose party swept to power in general elections just one week ago, immediately put signing the Kyoto pact at the top of his international agenda, providing new leverage at the upcoming talks.

At best, analysts believe, Bali could lead to a two-year negotiation in which the United States under a new administration, the Europeans and other industrial nations commit to deepening blanket emissions cuts. And they say major developing countries could agree to enshrine some national policies — China’s auto emission standards, for example, or energy-efficiency targets for power plants — as international obligations.

Japan, which has proposed cutting global emissions by 50 per cent by 2050 but opposes mandatory caps for individual nations, argued this week that the agreement should be flexible in order to draw as many parties to the table as possible.—AP