MARRAKESH, Nov 10: Negotiators agreed a deal here Saturday to seal the UN’s Kyoto Protocol on global warming, the cornerstone of efforts to combat looming climate change, but at the cost of major concessions.
“We have an agreement,” British Environment Minister Michael Meacher said.
“There is an agreement by everyone on everything,” his French counterpart, Yves Cochet, said.
The draft package was being put to a pre-dawn plenary session of Kyoto signatories. If approved, it would end nearly four years of negotiations to complete the rulebook of the world’s most ambitious climate treaty.
But — just as at an eerily similar bargaining session in Bonn, less than four months earlier — the deal was only achieved thanks to painful concessions by the European Union (EU).
“The main thing is that we have saved the Kyoto Protocol” said a spokesman for Belgium, the EU’s current president.
Greenpeace described the outcome as “a hard-won battle for a token outcome.”
Kyoto is an offshoot of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Signed in 1997, it requires more than three dozen industrialised countries to cut emissions of carbon-based gases by more than five percent by 2008-2012 compared with their 1990 levels.
Greenhouse gases are carbon substances that are mainly the unwanted by-product of burning oil, gas and coal.
Over the past century, so many billion tons of these gases have been released as a result of industrialisation that the Earth’s atmosphere is gradually warming, driving the climate system towards potentially calamitous change, scientists say.
The draft compromise gave enormous concessions on forestry demanded by Russia.
Forests and agricultural land are called “carbon sinks” because they absorb greenhouse gas pollution through photosynthesis. They thus become an asset which can be partially offset against national targets of pollution cuts.
A tactical alliance of four countries — Australia, Canada, Japan and Russia — demanded huge allocations of “sinks” at talks in Bonn in July that saved Kyoto from collapse.
Their goal, as in Japan’s case, was to ease the cost of meeting the Kyoto targets or, as in Russia’s case, to sell lots of emissions entitlements on the world’s future carbon market.
In Bonn, Russia had agreed to 17.6 million carbon tons per year in “sinks,” but then came back for more. The Marrakesh deal would meet its demands for 33 million tons per year.
Environmentalists had angrily opposed this, warning that polluting countries could simply buy cheap Russian carbon quotas to meet their targets rather than reduce their greenhouse gases.
Russia has huge emissions quotas to sell because the collapse of the Soviet economy and its gradual conversion to cleaner technology means it produces far less carbon dioxide than in 1990. The other part of the deal centred on criteria allowing access to Kyoto’s so-called flexibility mechanisms.
These are innovations that would harness market forces to help the industrialised world reach its target of cutting greenhouse-gas pollution with less economic pain.
The conference of environment ministers had been due to end late Friday.
But it spilled over into the early hours of Saturday, as the four-nation Umbrella Group refused to approve a compromise on the two sticking points.
Kyoto must be ratified by a sufficient number of industrialised countries in order to enter into force.
Many climate experts are pessimistic that the treaty will be able to make headway against global warming without the United States, the world’s biggest carbon polluter, onboard.
US President George W. Bush walked away from Kyoto in March, contending the format signed by his predecessor, Bill Clinton, was “fundamentally flawed” and unfair for the US economy.—AFP