More than a decade after a UN summit in Kyoto spawned the famous protocol on reducing greenhouse gases nations are still trying to devise a follow-up regime. What has changed?
 | A Greenpeace activist demonstrates in front of Parliament Hill to call on Canada's government to meet its commitments under the Kyoto Protocol (Photo: Reuters) |
The Japanese hosts bent over backwards to ensure that the 1997 UN Summit on Climate Change would end 30 months of international bickering. They wanted their summit to be a success. What they got was the Kyoto Protocol.
As early as 1992, UN members had met at the so-called Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro to reduce greenhouse gases and fight global warming. What they finally came up with – the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – called for stabilization of greenhouse gases, but did not set any mandatory limitations.
Time is running out
The Kyoto Protocol changed all this by committing 37 industrialized countries and the European Community to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions by an average of five per cent below 1990 levels during the first “commitment period” of 2008 to 2012.
They must do this primarily by cutting emissions at home but can also meet a portion of their targets through emissions trading and by paying developing countries to invest in green projects through the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).
Developing countries were not required to make emissions cuts on the understanding that rich nations were historically responsible for global warming and so should take the lead. Developing nations would follow later. This is the key Kyoto principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities.”
This angered U.S. politicians who felt major economic competitors like China and India with rapidly growing emissions were getting a ‘free ride’, an argument even more potent in times of economic crisis.
And so, despite the fact that U.S. scientists and politicians played an important role in negotiating the terms of the Kyoto Protocol, and though the United States signed the treaty, the U.S. Congress has never ratified it. In 2010, the world is waiting to see whether Congress will pass its own Climate Bill.
Several U.S. states have adopted the treaty’s stipulations voluntarily. Action is driven by policymakers in states like California or Michigan, who have set caps on emissions.
But the absence of the world’s most powerful country with the biggest historical carbon footprint has undermined the Kyoto Protocol’s legitimacy from the start.
Nevertheless, after years of discussions about ratification, the treaty finally entered into force in 2005 with the signature of former Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The 2009 Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen was supposed to provide a way forward post-2012.
Instead the summit stumbled to a non-binding political agreement—The Copenhagen Accord—that was negotiated by President Barack Obama and the BASIC emerging world powers—Brazil, South Africa, India and China.
The Accord does not include any mandatory emissions cuts. The international community will try to turn it into something stronger in Mexico in November 2010.
Renegotiating in a changing world
One of the key stumbling blocks in Denmark was the future fate of the Kyoto Protocol. Nations were divided over whether to renew the Kyoto Protocol or replace it.
Most developing countries, in particular China and India, want the Protocol extended because it enshrines in law the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” that does not commit them to emissions cuts.
They point out that many industrialized nations are predicted to miss their Kyoto targets and so they suspect that a replacement for Kyoto would allow the rich world to dodge those commitments.
But the international scene has changed dramatically since 1997. China surpassed the United States as the world’s number-one emitter of greenhouse gases sometime during 2007. India, once a rather marginal producer of carbon emissions, will be the third-biggest source of carbon dioxide by 2015, just behind China and the U.S.
It would be absurd if these countries did not join the battle against climate change.
Therefore the United States and other industrialized countries want to replace Kyoto with something that requires China, India and other fast-growing emerging economies to cut emissions too, and cut them in a way that can be monitored and verified independently.
Tensions in Copenhagen rose until at one point developing nations stormed out of talks accusing the hosts and industrialized countries of conspiring to “kill Kyoto”.
The Accord was a messy compromise, according to The Climate Group’s senior analyst Damian Ryan. “The final Accord said that Parties will continue on two negotiating tracks, which suggests Kyoto will survive,” he says. “But there is still wriggle room for developed countries to move out of the Kyoto track and join the U.S. in another track”. Kyoto’s fate will depend on ongoing negotiations in 2010.
Perhaps reflecting the lingering mistrust, Ryan is cautious about the likely road ahead.
“To dismiss the Accord now would be premature. In the best-case scenario we have a stronger agreement because we have got China, India, Brazil, South Africa and other developing countries into an agreement where they will take action,” he says. “In the worst-case scenario it could have weakened what we already have. We need to see action, or we will be in trouble.”
The final word on Kyoto will only be known around 2012, when countries tally up their emissions in the 2008 to 2012 period to see if they made enough cuts. Those who overshoot their targets will have to make both the promised cuts and 30 percent more in a second commitment period from 2013. That is, if the Kyoto Protocol survives.
editor: Thilo Kunzemann
latest update: March 15, 2010
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