MARRAKESH: After two weeks of tough bargaining, representatives from 167 countries managed to hammer out an accord that would pave the way for the ratification of a treaty aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but activists described the deal as “meagre”.

The accord, reached here at the weekend, provides for a detailed rulebook governing the complex Kyoto Protocol devised in 1997 in the Japanese city of Kyoto.

The document commits industrialized countries to cut by 2012 their emissions of carbon dioxide — suspected of causing global warming — by an average of five per cent from 1990 levels. The deadline is September 2002, or 10 years after the first action on climate control was adopted at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Environmentalist groups, like Greenpeace, described the Marrakesh accord as “meagre”. “Marrakesh was a tough battle that yielded a meagre result,” the environmental group lamented in a statement circulated at the end of the conference.

“Governments can congratulate themselves, but they should wonder what they indeed achieved,” Greenpeace Climate Director Bill Hare, told journalists.

“While climate change is worsening, the future leaders will look back to the Marrakesh conference as a wasted opportunity and will realize that participants in this meeting could have made more efforts to address the real problems,” he said.

“The Protocol is only a modest beginning towards a more important commitment to reduce global gas emissions. We still have a long path to go,” he added.

According to Greenpeace, gas emissions should be cut by 80 per cent to curb the adverse climate changes, drought, floods and other plagues.

The Marrakesh accord caps a four-year effort to draft binding regulations on limiting greenhouse gas emissions and marks the start of a ratification process before the Kyoto Protocol’s concrete beginning.

Scientists who attended the Marrakesh conference joined environmentalists in their scepticism over the impact of the Protocol in curbing gas emissions.

The gas emission cuts provided for in the Protocol will not be enough to stabilize the climate, the scientists deplored.

According to a scientific document circulated during the conference, the Kyoto Protocol, if strictly implemented, would help reduce by year 2012 the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from 384 ppm (the unit to measure green house effect gas) to 382 ppm.

“The amount of carbon to be reduced is a only a drop in a sea,” Dr Mohammad Bouhind, an expert from the Moroccan centre of nuclear studies (CNESTEN) based in Rabat said.

For Dr Marc Darras, an expert of the World Gas Union, the Kyoto Protocol was “only a starting point. It cannot be considered the end of the tunnel”. “For it to succeed in the long run, the Protocol has to be modified to encompass all countries of the world, including the grand defector, USA.” —Dawn/InterPress Service.