Australia, which along with the United States has not ratified the UN's Kyoto Treaty on climate change, said on Tuesday that it was ready to work on "long-term solutions" to the problem of global warming of the earth's atmosphere.
The country's ambassador for the environment, Jan Adams, also told a UN conference on the treaty being held in the German city of Bonn that Australia was in the process of fulfilling the limits that would have been imposed on it if it had ratified the treaty.
"By means of domestic policy and measures, we are on track to limit emissions to our target agreed at Kyoto," she said, referring to the 1997 climate conference which drew up the treaty in the Japanese city of that name.
"Australia looks forward to making further progress on developing long-term solutions to climate change, both with regard to mitigation and adaptation," she told the meeting, which is studying how the Kyoto treaty could be extended past its expiry date of 2012.
She added that the world would have to continue to rely on fossil fuels – oil, coal and natural gas – for the foreseeable future, and that the key issue would therefore be to develop cleaner ways of burning those fuels.
"Global dependence on fossil fuels for energy will be an enduring reality for our lifetimes and beyond. A major collective challenge, therefore, is to develop and implement cleaner, more efficient technologies that allow for the continued economic use of fossil fuels while constraining emissions," she said.
The meeting, which brings together officials from 150 countries, opened on Monday with a warning from host Germany that climate change caused by excessive emissions of man-made carbon gases "is already a harsh reality."
Australia and the United States are the only rich industrialised countries which have refused to ratify the Kyoto treaty.
The agreement only came into force in February this year, after years of wrangling and despite opposition from the United States, the world's largest carbon polluter.
Kyoto requires industrialized countries which have signed and ratified it to trim output of carbon dioxide (CO2) and five other carbon gases that trap solar heat in the atmosphere instead of letting it radiate back into space.
