Warming Up for Kyoto: Climate Change On-line

Global climate change will be the single-most reported environmental issue leading up to the Kyoto Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change in December. As the atmosphere heats up at the climate change talks in Bonn, an independent reporting service, supported by twelve governments, provides a neutral source of information directly from the negotiations.

The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), a Canadian-based environment and development policy research center, announced today the immediate availability of several free sources of information on the climate change negotiations.

IISD publishes the Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB), a daily 2000 word summary in French and English that details the positions taken by governments at this week's meeting in Bonn on the protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The ENB will also be published at the Third Conference of the Parties to be held in Kyoto from 1-10 December 1997. For information on how to subscribe, send e-mail to [email protected]

The ENB is a politically neutral reporting service for meetings on international environment and development policy, providing real-time information on climate change, biological diversity, desertification, sustainable development, chemical management and forest issues. Support for the ENB is provided by the governments of the Netherlands, US, UK, Canada, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, Austria and the European Community.

According to IISD Reporting Services Managing Director, Langston Goree, "Our small team of lawyers and academics, armed with laptop computers, attend these and other UN negotiations. Each night we write and edit summaries of the negotiations, which are distributed over the Internet and printed out each morning for the negotiators. We think that they are an excellent resource for journalists or for anyone who wants to receive information direct from the negotiations."

IISD's WWW site on Climate Change policy features background materials, daily photos, RealAudio interviews with negotiators, reports from previous Climate Change negotiations, links to official documentation and other related sites. The site is located at http://www.iisd.ca/climate

The CLIMATE-L e-mail list, maintained and moderated by IISD, facilitates the exchange of information on the climate change negotiating process. More than one thousand subscribers share information on climate change policy. To subscribe to the CLIMATE-L list, send an e-mail message to [email protected] with the one line message: subscribe CLIMATE-L