Rising tensions with India and China over the European Union's "arrogant" law on carbon emissions could rob the region of the markets that can rescue it from economic malaise, airline leaders said on Thursday.

They also said they had prepared contingency plans for a possible exit of Greece from the euro, as part of the industry's extensive crisis management, and they were worried about a domino effect of more countries' being forced out of the currency bloc, with implications for all businesses.

China's central government plans to spend 170 billion yuan ($27 billion) this year to promote energy conservation, emission reductions and renewable energy, the Ministry of Finance said in a statement on its website on Thursday.

The ministry said China plans to promote more use of energy-saving products and low or no-emission power generation such as solar and wind. It also wants to accelerate the development of renewable energy, as well as energy-saving technologies, such as electric and hybrid cars.

Even as drought persists in parts of Kenya's arid north, intense rains are claiming lives in other parts of the country – flooding slums in the capital Nairobi, sweeping away hikers in the Rift Valley, and destroying crops.

Many Kenyans shake their heads in dismay at the increasingly extreme and volatile weather, which is costing money as well as lives in east Africa's economic powerhouse.

Climate researchers said Thursday the planet could warm by more than 3.5 degrees Celsius, boosting the risk of drought, flood and rising seas. The UN's target is a 2 C limit on warming from pre-industrial levels for manageable climate change. In a report, scientists said Earth's average global temperature rise could exceed the dangerous 3.5 C warming they had flagged only six months ago.

After drawing international acclaim, Indonesia's moratorium on forest clearing has proved hard to implement, as special interests whittle down the area protected under the agreement, environmental groups say.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is likely to veto some controversial aspects of a forest bill passed by the Congress last month as pressure mounts against the text days before the country hosts a large UN conference on sustainable development.

The bill, a revision of Brazil's Forest Code, grants partial amnesty to landowners who had illegally cleared some of their forests until as recently as 2008, relaxing the legal requirements for reforestation of these areas.

A yearly review of countries' greenhouse gas emissions cut pledges under an extension to the global climate pact the Kyoto Protocol could be a way to raise climate ambitions, the European Union's lead climate negotiator said on Wednesday.

Negotiators from over 180 countries are meeting in Bonn, Germany, until Friday to work towards getting a new global climate pact signed by 2015 and to ensure ambitious emissions cuts are made after the Kyoto Protocol expires at the end of this year.

UN climate talks are going nowhere, as politicians dither or bicker while the pace of warming dangerously speeds up, one of the architects of the Kyoto Protocol said.
‘It seems to me that negotiations are returning to square one,’ said Raul Estrada, the ‘father’ of the world’s only treaty to specify curbs in greenhouse gases, as the first talks for a new global pact took place in Bonn.
In a telephone interview from Buenos Aires this week, Estrada defended his beleaguered accord and said efforts to engineer a replacement were in trouble.