RI TAKES PART IN BONN CLIMATE CHANGE SIDE EVENT

London, June 11 (ANTARA) - Indonesia is taking part in a meeting on "The Role of Oceans in Climate Change - From Manado to Copenhagen" organized on the sidelines of the Bonn Climate Change Talks to follow up the recommendations of the World Ocean Conference (WOC).

Prof. Dr Indroyono Soesilo, assistant to the Coordinating Minister for People's Welfare, has been participating in the meeting to discuss the important role of oceans in climate change, a press release of the Indonesian Embassy in Berlin, said, on Thursday.

The Bonn meeting organized under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was attended by representatives of various countries and NGOs.

At the meeting, Prof. Soesilo presented the recommendations of the WOC 2009 held in Manado last May 2009 which called for the mainstreaming of oceans as a dimension in the final document of the COP (Conference of the Parties)-15 to UNFCCC to be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December 2009.

Meanwhile, Indonesian Ambassador to Germany Eddy Pratomo affirmed Indonesia's commitment to promoting ocean issues in international meetings on climate change, including in the UNFCCC.

Indonesia would cooperate with member countries of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) in promoting oceans in climate change talks.

Soesilo was among the 3,000 delegates from 190 countries attending the e meeting in Bonn which opened last June 1 and is to run until June 12 to prepare a new agreement on reducing carbon emissions after 2012 by setting targets for developed nations.

The new climate-change pact will succeed the first phase of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol which requires 37 industrialized nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 5 percent from 1990 levels by 2012.

After the Bonn meeting, three other climate-change meetings are scheduled for this year, ahead of the Copenhagen meeting, where the Kyoto Protocol's replacement is to be formally adopted.