11/29/11 3:30pm

Article By: Marty Niland

The European Union is standing by the the Kyoto Protocol for now, but before it agrees to extend the 1997 climate-change pact, it wants other countries to start working on a future global-warming treaty.

At UN climate talks in Durban, South Africa,  EU chief climate negotiator Artur Runge-Metzger told reporters that European nations are prepared to stand alone in re-committing to Kyoto after it expires next year, according to South Africa's Cape Times. But he said that will happen only if all other nations can produce by 2015 a "roadmap" for a legally-binding framework to cut greenhouse gas emissions. He said the EU has always supported Kyoto, but noted that Canada, Russia and Japan were threatening to pull out of the agreement, which already excludes the U.S., China and other large greenhouse-gas emitters.

But Bloomberg reports that the Obama administration is standing firm in its position that it won't take part in such a deal unless all the world's major emitters, including China and India, commit to reductions. “There’s no framework that we can envision that would be a successful framework that didn’t include all the major economies,” U.S. Deputy Special Envoy Jonathan Pershing told reporters.

And while negotiators at the current talks struggle to agree on climate issues, Reuters reports that the site of the next major talks has already been announced: Qatar.