Visiting Antarctic, Amazon helped climate case: Ban

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JAKARTA (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Saturday that visiting Antarctica and the Amazon had brought home to him personally the critical need to tackle climate change.

JAKARTA (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Saturday that visiting Antarctica and the Amazon had brought home to him personally the critical need to tackle climate change.

Nearly 200 nations meeting in Bali reached a deal to launch talks on a pact to fight global warming, but only after a reversal by the United States allowed a historic breakthrough.

Ban, who has made climate change a priority, went last month to the tip of South America to see melting glaciers and the Antarctic, where temperatures are at their highest in about 1,800 years. He also went to the Amazon basin in Brazil, a leader in developing biofuels from crops as an alternative to fossil fuels.

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"That visit also made me personally much more convinced in my conviction. That has given me much more convincing power in talking to other people," Ban said in an interview on board a flight from the East Timor capital Dili to Jakarta via Bali.

The U.N. Secretary General stopped over in Bali to make an 11th hour appeal to negotiators to end a deadlock in the talks.

The breakthrough came shortly afterwards when nations approved a "roadmap" for two years of talks on a treaty to succeed the existing Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012, widening it to the United States and developing nations such as China and India.

The deal after two weeks of talks came after Washington dropped opposition to a proposal by the main developing-nation bloc, the G77, for rich nations to do more to help the developing world fight rising greenhouse emissions.

Ban took some credit for raising awareness over climate change, which a U.N. climate panel has said is caused by human activities led by burning fossil fuels that produce carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.

"If you look at the situation last year, even early this year there was not much heightened understanding and awareness," said Ban, who has visited nearly 60 countries in his first year as U.N. Secretary General.

"This is the defining moment for me and my mandate as secretary-general," the 64-year-old Ban told Reuters separately, shortly after a deal was reached and before re-boarding a U.N. plane to resume his flight to the Indonesian capital Jakarta.

"I appreciate that all the countries...recognized that this is a defining agenda for all humanity, for all planet earth," said Ban, 64, a former South Korean foreign minister.

He cautioned, however, that there was a lot more work to do.

"This is just a beginning, a beginning of the negotiations. Next year we'll have to engage in a much more complex and difficult process of negotiation."

Ban this week also made his first visit to Asia's youngest nation East Timor, which plunged into chaos last year during factional violence that killed 37 people and drove more than 100,000 from their homes.

"This is a huge challenge. Almost one tenth of the population are now living in camps," said Ban, who toured a camp for displaced people in the capital Dili during his one-day visit.

The United Nations will decide in February whether to extend the mandate of its mission in the country, which became fully independent in 2002 after voting to break away from Indonesian rule in a violence-marred U.N. sponsored ballot in 1999.