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Climate: Something has to give
Amid gloom-and-doom climate predictions, the Kyoto treaty is criticized by all: those who say it does too little, those who say too few countries are involved, and those who say it's too costly. But something will have to give in this debate very soon.
By Eric J Lyman in Bonn for ISN Security Watch (24/05/07)
This is the year that something's going to have to give in the world debate over how to best confront climate change.
As things stand, the Kyoto Protocol - which will turn 10 years old in December - is the only significant multi-lateral agreement aimed specifically at reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that scientists say cause global warming. The protocol seeks to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gasses in 40 industrialized countries by an average of 5.4 percent compared to 1990 levels during the five-year compliance period that ends in 2012.
While newspapers are full of stories predicting extreme problems if temperatures rise as predicted - melting ice caps, for example, expanding deserts, rising sea levels, increasingly severe weather, fresh water shortages, diminishing agricultural production and the wider spread of disease - the Kyoto treaty designed to confront the problem is criticized on all sides. Environmentalists say it does too little; Kyoto-skeptic nations say it involves too few countries; and even advocates say compliance may be too costly.
More significantly, the beleaguered Kyoto document also has no say on what happens after 2012, when the problems are expected to worsen.
Given the speed with which these types of treaties are hammered out, the UN says, that creates a sense of urgency.
"We need to make sure that there's an architecture in place for after 2012 that starts immediately after Kyoto rules go out of effect, with no break," Yvo de Boer, the UN's top climate change official, told ISN Security Watch. De Boer spoke on the sidelines of the recent negotiations in Bonn known by the unwieldy name of the 26th Session of the Subsidiary Bodies for Scientific and Technological Advice and for Implementation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
"At best, that means two years to negotiate what that architecture will look like, and two more years to have it ratified by enough countries for it to go into effect," de Boer continued. "Do the math; that means we have to start right away."
Officially, the next step is the UN's annual climate change summit - called the Conference of the Parties - which this December will be held in Bali, Indonesia. But between now and then, the UN and other advocates of the Kyoto treaty are pulling out all the stops with an upcoming set of meetings that could improve chances that delegates at what will be the 13th meeting of the Conference of the Parties will agree to go forward with negotiations for the period after 2012 starting next year.
The first such meeting will be the Group of Eight summit, to be held next month in Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel has said she would use the opportunity to lobby the leaders of the world's wealthiest economies - including US President George W Bush, the world's most visible Kyoto skeptic - to take more decisive action on climate change.
Additionally, a normally low-key set of talks called the Fourth Ad-hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex-I Parties Under the Kyoto Protocol will meet in late August in Vienna. Much of what was left undone at the 7-18 May talks in Bonn was tabled until Vienna.
And the most dramatic development involves a high-level climate change summit called by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, to be held on the sidelines of the UN's annual ministerial meeting on 24 September at UN headquarters in New York. It will be the first time climate change policy will be discussed at such a high level. The aim of that unprecedented meeting, UN officials say, will be to cajole countries into making climate change talks a higher priority.
Climate beyond 2012, open for negotiation
"Every step that is being taken to move the process forward is being taken," Pat Finnegan, director of the Irish environmental lobby group GRIAN, told ISN Security Watch in Bonn. "But everyone knows how difficult it was to get the Kyoto agreement in place back in the 1990s. I don't think anyone expects the next phase to be any easier."
That is especially true given that nobody even knows what the post-2012 architecture will look like.
The Kyoto Protocol is based on what is called a cap-and-trade system. That means there is a cap on the total emissions for any country - the average of 5.4 percent below 1990 levels during the 2008-2012 period. Countries can either reduce emissions to stay within that cap, buy credits from participating countries that have reduced more than required, or earn credits by investing in emissions-reducing projects in other parts of the world. Economists advocate systems involving trading because they help assure that reductions come where the costs are lowest.
But there is nothing that says the agreement on the post-2012 period will look anything like the current cap-and-trade structure.
Everything is open for negotiation: the countries that will be involved, the way progress will be measured, the types of sanctions for non-compliance, the period of time the agreement will cover, even whether or not the structure will be under the auspices of the UN.
One sign that may indicate how hard it will be to reach a new agreement came at the recent Bonn talks, when an idea first floated by Russia in 2005 finally came up for discussion. The proposal - known by the oxymoronic-sounding name "voluntary commitments" - is designed to streamline the process for countries not required to accept greenhouse gas emission reduction commitments to do so voluntarily. In recent years, there have been two countries interested in doing so: Kazakhstan and Belarus.
The countries are not altruists. Because the baseline year for the Kyoto Protocol is 1990, just before the Soviet-era economies of both countries collapsed, Kazakhstan and Belarus have lower emissions today than they did 17 years ago. That likely translates into cash for them in the form of credits that could be sold off to more developed economies like Japan, Canada and most of Western Europe, where emissions reductions are harder to come by. But there has been resistance to allowing them to take on commitments.
The resistance comes from several fronts. Some Eastern European countries with similarly advantageous emissions levels balk at adding more credits to a market for credits already considered by many to be too unstable. And poorer countries that are not required to take on commitments fear that if Kazakhstan and Belarus are allowed to opt into the system, it could set a precedent by which they might be required to do the same thing before they are ready to do so.
"If it could somehow be assured that Kazakhstan and Belarus could take on the targets they want and then the discussion stopped there, I doubt there would be so much controversy," former UN climate change executive secretary Michael Zammit Cutajar, who chaired a workgroup on the subject in Bonn, told ISN Security Watch.
Still, it is noteworthy that a process created to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would be so slow to accept a pair of countries that want to participate. Expert observers say it is likely that Kazakhstan and Belarus will eventually be allowed to take on commitments, though their commitments may not go into force until after 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol is officially dead. And it is still anyone's guess what the landscape will look like at that point.
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Eric J Lyman is ISN Security Watch's correspondent in Rome.
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