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UK-based international development agency Christian Aid will push for a follow-on agreement to the Kyoto Protocol to include large-scale financial support for developing nations from the rich industrialised world at the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali this week.

Christian Aid is sending an expert team to lobby at the 3 – 14 December 2007 conference, including political relations advisor Nelson Muffah and campaigns manager Sarah Spinney.

Also joining the team will be Mohamed Adow, a representative of Christian Aid’s Muslim partner agency in Kenya, Northern Aid, which works to help re-build the lives of thousands of pastoralists who have seen their way of life disappear as a result of drought.

Northern Aid works to build reconciliation between communities that have fallen victim to conflict and divisions over scarce resources like water or land for grazing.

Through his work with the agency, Adow has experienced first hand the impact that climate change is already having on the world’s poorer communities.

Christian Aid says it hopes that the Bali conference, which starts tomorrow, will lead to substantial agreement over an internationally agreed long-term goal to reduce emissions.

The agency adds that any emissions reduction plan should include “rapid and deep” cuts in carbon emissions in wealthy countries, and financial support for developing countries “to enable them to make cuts without suffering economically”.

Christian Aid is to co-host a panel discussion in Bali on greenhouse development rights, an economic model that sets out one possible way to portion up the bill for the developed world country by country, according to each country’s historic responsibility for carbon emissions, and taking into consideration their capacity to pay.

Panel members will include Martin Kohr, director of the Third World Network and an adviser to G77 (the group of economically poorer nations); Philip Gwage, lead negotiator for the Ugandan government; Paul Baer of US climate change think-tank EcoEquity; Sivan Kartha from the Stockholm Environment Institute, and Mohamed Adow of Northern Aid in Kenya.

The meeting will be chaired by Barbara Unmuessig, who is president of the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

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