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Kyoto Protocol: Backgrounder on UN's global-warming treaty
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  • PARIS (AFP) Sep 30, 2004
    Sprawling, stuffed with daring but untested ideas and politically troubled, the Kyoto Protocol, whose ratification was approved by Russia's cabinet on Thursday, is the cornerstone of efforts to combat man-made global warming.

    To its supporters, Kyoto is the planet's lifeline: the only international accord that can avert potential catastrophe -- the steady buildup of solar heat, trapped by the carbon gas of fossil fuels, which could change our climate system forever.

    To its critics, Kyoto will be unworkable, crippled by a rulebook of fiendish complexity and the absence of the biggest polluter of all.

    Now only requiring ratification by the Russian parliament to come into force despite US opposition, the UN pact was approved by 159 countries on December 12, 1997 as a statement of aims and methods.

    It took four more years for its rulebook, the most complicated of any environmental treaty in history, to be negotiated.

    The charter commits 39 industrialised signatories to bring annual global emissions of six greenhouse gases, the main one being carbon dioxide (CO2), to below 1990 levels by a timeframe of 2008-2012.

    To achieve that, they will have to restrain the burning of oil, coal and gas, the carbon-bearing sources that sparked the Industrial Revolution and remain the foundation for economic life today.

    Those changes carry an economic tab to consumers, a threat to vested interests and a challenge to lifestyles. Unsurprisingly, Kyoto has run into fierce crossfire from the oil lobby and from conservatives like US President George W. Bush.

    To soften the cost and encourage the change, the Protocol includes several innovative mechanisms.

    They include a planned "carbon market" in which industrialised signatories can buy and sell emissions of CO2 to help meet their quota target, thus providing a financial incentive to get clean.

    Industrialised countries which plant forests, which soak up CO2, can also offset the trees against their emissions, and they can also claim against their quotas if they help poorer countries acquire clean technology.

    But these mechanisms raise many questions. They are vaultingly ambitious and so extraordinarily detailed that they may be vulnerable to manipulation, fraud or the dead weight of bureaucracy.

    Different reduction targets are set for the various signatories: six percent for Japan, zero percent for Russia and eight percent for the former 15-member European Union (EU).

    Within Europe, targets vary from a 21-percent reduction for Germany to a 15-percent increase for Spain, with France remaining at zero percent.

    The big holdout is Washington, which by itself accounts for a quarter of global carbon pollution.

    It walked away from Kyoto in 2001, saying the anti-pollution pact was too costly for its oil-gobbling economy.

    It also declared Kyoto to be unfair because developing countries -- historically, the least to blame for global warming -- are not bound to make specific pollution cuts.

    Without the US, the overall reduction in emissions is likely to be 0.6 percent if Kyoto is honoured, well below the initial target of 5.2 percent, according to the US environment group World Resources Institute (WRI).

    However, further negotiations are scheduled for 2005 to pursue efforts to reduce emissions after the 2008-2012 timeframe.

    Fast-growing developing countries like China and India will be under intensifying pressure to join the club of targeted-emissions cuts under Kyoto

    Kyoto is an offshoot of the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which Washington ratified and came into force in 1994.

    Once it comes into force, the Protocol will be legally binding on those countries that have signed and ratified it.




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