San Antonio expected to hold next environment summit

GWANGJU, Oct. 14 (Yonhap) -- The U.S. city of San Antonio, Texas has expressed an interest in hosting the next urban environment summit in 2013, as attendees wrapped up the 2011 Gwangju Summit of the Urban Environmental Accords (UEA) this week.
A San Antonio delegation said it would be open to holding the next summit at the closing ceremony for the 2011 summit that took place in the city about 330 kilometers southwest of Seoul on Thursday.
The next biennial summit will be charged with releasing the concrete results of the Gwangju Declaration and deciding what cities can really contribute to solving a wide range of environmental issues.
In addition, when the final framework for the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is released, attendees at the next summit are expected to discuss the official duties of the UEA.
The CDM was created under the Kyoto Protocol as one of several ways to facilitate carbon trading in an effort to get cities to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The 1997 protocol obliges nearly 40 developed countries to reduce their emissions over a five-year period through the end of 2012 by an average of 5.2 percent from 1990 levels.
Attendees at the Gwangju summit discussed the agreement and hammered out a new framework for emissions trading with the final version to be released sometime soon, according to summit organizers.
The seventh-largest U.S city, San Antonio is known as the "Venice of America" for its beautiful downtown River Walk. The city inked a deal with Gwangju in 1982 to become sister cities.