EU climate official lauds Copenhagen

BRUSSELS, Dec. 23 (UPI) -- While welcoming environmental considerations for biodiversity, European officials in Brussels praised the Denmark climate summit as an important first step.

Stavros Dimas, the environment commissioner for the European Union, hailed a non-binding agreement reached at a multinational climate summit in Copenhagen as an important first step toward a global climate-change measure.

"A lot of work still needs to be done," he said. "We must now ensure that the Copenhagen accord becomes operational and as such constitutes the core of a new climate treaty."

Amid political sniping, world leaders at a two-week summit in the Danish capital agreed to work toward comprehensive cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to slow the pace of global warming. Poor countries also receive financial assistance to develop green energy technology.

Dimas also welcomed a European measure to encourage biodiversity, describing biodiversity as nature's way of storing carbon dioxide in the ecosystem and thereby protecting vulnerable societies from the impacts of climate change.

World leaders take up the matter of climate change next at a summit in Mexico City in 2010.