New Life for Kyoto Protocol

The agreement reached last week in Bonn, largely due to pressures from the G-77 and Chine, has paved the way for guarded optimism on curbing climate change.

BONN - The Kyoto Protocol on climate change has survived, and may enter into force as soon as next year, according to a cautious optimism that arose among 180 delegations gathered here earlier this month.

The document, agreed four years ago in the Japanese city of the same name calls for an average 5.2-percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions on the 1990 level by 2012.

However, in order to take effect it must be ratified by at least 55 percent of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

It was signed by 84 countries, but so far just 35 developing countries and Romania have ratified it. However, an accord reached July 23 in Bonn fueled moderate optimism among the environment ministers and officials taking part in the conference.

An agreement on the operational rulebook for the treaty came in the aftermath of marathon negotiations, and was reached after Japan broke the deadlock when it said it would support a draft agreement tabled by the conference president Jan Pronk, environment minister of the Netherlands.

The first stage of the sixth conference of parties (COP6) to the Framework Convention last November at The Hague, ended in failure.

The cause, according to ambassador Bagher Asadi of Iran at the UN, was that Pronk did not involve the Group of 77 (G-77) and China - comprising 133 developing countries - in crucial consultations. Asadi chairs the G-77 and China for the UN climate change talks.

The Bonn political agreement largely made possible by the ''constructive role'' that Asadi, the G-77 and China played during the negotiations, said Germany's Environment Minister Juergen Trittin.

Asadi on his part described the political agreement as ''the triumph of multilateralism and cooperation over unilateralism'' - an obvious reference to the decision mid-March by US President George W. Bush to abandon the Kyoto Protocol, calling it ''fatally flawed'' and harmful to the US economy.

European Union conference sources confirmed in Bonn that it was at the insistence of the G-77 and China that the Bonn conference has agreed to establish three special funds to reduce climate change and to help developing countries adapt to climate change impacts, obtain clean technologies, and limit the growth in their emissions.

The 15 members of the EU and other donor nations confirmed in a ''political declaration'' their commitment to finance programs related to climate change in developing countries.

They said they were prepared to contribute 410 million dollars annually by 2005, with that level to be reviewed in 2008.

One key point of the agreement is that countries may offset their obligations to reduce industrial pollution by counting the proper management of forests and farmlands that absorb carbon dioxide, known as carbon ''sinks''.

If the EU had not granted this concession, albeit reluctantly, Japan, Canada and Australia would not have gone aboard.

However, EU officials were pleased with the overall compromise. Belgium's environment minister Olivier Deleuze said there were 10 things in the texts that he could criticize. ''But I prefer an imperfect agreement that is living than a perfect agreement that doesn't exist,'' he said.

''Today's agreement will keep up the pressure for early emissions reductions by governments and the private sector in the developed world," said Michael Zammit Cutajar, executive secretary of the Convention.

''It should also strengthen financial and technological support to developing countries to enable them to take action on climate change,'' he added.

However, indigenous peoples and other communities fear that the measures proposed as solutions to the problem of climate change, such as plantations, sinks and the carbon market, among others, will result in projects with negative and adverse effects on indigenous peoples, their territories and ecosystems.

A forum of indigenous peoples and local communities, which met July 16-27, urged the delegates to include their specific concerns in the conference’s final documents.

For her part, Satu Hassi, Finland's Minister of Environment and Development Cooperation commented that the United States will have to do whatever necessary to return to the Kyoto Protocol.

The agreement ''is the result of ten years' work, something that must not be thrown away just because a government of one country changes its mind, even if it is a big country,'' said Hassi.

* Ramesh Jaura is an IPS correspondent.