Climate conference under way in Geneva

GENEVA, Switzerland, Aug. 31 (UPI) -- High-level policymakers, scientists and business leaders are gathering in Switzerland this week for a climate conference that focuses on coping with effects of climate change such as droughts and floods.

The goal of the roughly 1,000 delegates -- among them a large U.S. delegation -- at the World Climate Conference in Geneva is to make sure that poorer nations have the information to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. It sidesteps the tricky issue of emissions reductions, which is due to be discussed before and during a major U.N. climate-change conference this December in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Organized by the World Meteorological Organization, a U.N. agency responsible for meteorology, the five-day conference is due to see the creation of a Global Framework for Climate Services, a network that is aimed at spreading information about floods, storms, droughts or tsunamis to even the most remote regions affected by those disasters.

The many different agencies have compiled vast data about climate change and its predicted effects, but authorities in many countries lack access to that data or don't use it properly.

In Africa, water management, for example, could be dramatically improved if authorities took into account available data on precipitation and underground water tables.

The conference comes three months before a Dec. 7-18 meeting in Copenhagen, where the world's nations are due to agree on a set of binding emissions-reductions targets, adaptation measures and their funding. The accord to be born at Copenhagen is due to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which runs out in 2012.

Gerd Tetzlaff, meteorologist at the University of Leipzig and the chief scientific adviser to the German disaster prevention agency DKKV, told Deutsche Welle Online that the conference was important "because it's virtually the first time the climate experts will be meeting in a framework like this to discuss how you actually reach the relevant responsible parties to draw practical conclusions from the results of climate forecasts."

The meeting in Geneva is the third World Climate Conference after the 1979 and 1990 installments. They have given rise to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body that has published several special reports that are now the basis of the U.N.-mandated climate negotiations. The World Climate Conference is not linked to the Copenhagen conference at the end of the year.