Sustainability and policy - Climate Change: Biological and Human Aspects - page 454

The UNCED was a summit at which nations took two steps forward and one step
back: progress was made only in that nations agreed that progress needed to be made.
Nonetheless, there was a framework for development. The next major step down this
road from a climate perspective was taken at Kyoto in 1997.
8.1.8 TheKyotoProtocol(1997)
The World Climate Conference was held in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997 and
was a direct result of the UN's FCCC. The problem during Kyoto was that Russia
and, arguably more importantly, the USA, dragged their feet. Russia did so because
its economy was behind that of Europe and the USA, and although it sought to
develop its industrial base had gone into recession after the 1988-90 devolution of
many of the former Soviet Bloc nations. Russia did eventually sign up in 2004.
The USA was noticeably unenthusiastic and had much at stake, as North America
had less than 5% of global population yet around 24% of global emissions at the
turn of the millennium. Here the problem was not so much that President Clinton's
administration did not accept the urgency of climate change issues, but that the
administration was gridlocked between the Senate and Congress. There was little
point in the USA agreeing to policies internationally that would not be ratified in its
own country. However, the USA did call for carbon trading between nations, whereby
efficient users of carbon could trade permits with inefficient users. It also called for
trading to take into account a nation's planting of forests. The problem with this last,
as noted in Chapter 7, is that whereas new forest growth does sequester carbon, as do
some soils, and quantifying this is difficult. There are also problems in ensuring that
carbon so sequestered remains sequestered.
The Kyoto Protocol set an international target for there to be a reduction of emis-
sions (of all anthropogenic greenhouse gases) by 5% of the 1990 level (the FCCC
benchmark year, although a 1995 base year was allowable for some nations' account-
ing) by the Protocol's first implementation period of 2008-12. Nationally, though,
commitments to savings made by individual nations varied. The OECD nations gen-
erally had to make the most savings (an exception being Australia and some of the
smaller nations) and the UK and Germany agreed to make greater savings so as to
lessen the burden on some other EU states. The UK's target at the time was to reduce
its greenhouse emissions by 12.5% below the 1990 base year by 2008-12. This is
greater than the collective EU target (by the then 1997 EU states) of 8%: individual
EU nations contributed to this collective goal by agreement subject to their economic
circumstances.
Importantly, the Protocol established three 'flexible mechanisms' to achieving
mechanism reductions: Joint Implementation (JI), the Clean Development Mechan-
ism (CDM) and international emissions trading. Together these allow countries to
achieve part of their legally binding targets by actions in other countries that are party
to the FCCC. Emissions trading enables countries which achieve greater reductions
than needed to meet their own target to sell the surplus to other countries. JI and CDM
allow countries with targets to receive a credit for project-based activities that reduce
emissions in other nations. Even so, under the Protocol, these three mechanisms must
be in addition to action to curb emissions taken by a nation itself, with such domestic