Yvo de Boer, executive secretary © UNFCCC

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the international treaty agreed at the Rio de Janeiro "Earth Summit" in 1992. It established the vital principle that “the developed country Parties should take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof.” These countries are known as Annex 1 countries and it is they who are subject to legally binding targets under The Kyoto Protocol which was negotiated in 1997 as a supplement to the UNFCC and eventually ratified in February 2005.

Canada and Japan are almost certain to fall short of their commitments but the Annex 1 countries in aggregate should achieve the Kyoto target. This seeks a 5% reduction in the 1990 level of greenhouse gas emissions by 2012. However, the calculation excludes emissions from aviation and shipping and there has been no contribution from the US which refused to ratify the Protocol.

Until the economic recession of 2008/09, global emissions have therefore been rising sharply, defying the scientists who plead that the level must peak and start to fall before 2020. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now at its highest for at least 800,000 years.

The key question for the future of global warming is whether the Kyoto Protocol will be followed in 2012 by a more inclusive international agreement, whilst retaining the vital discipline of binding quantifiable targets. In seeking to limit global warming to two degrees, negotiations are loosely based on an IPCC stabilisation scenario which cuts the 1990 baseline of emissions by 50% by 2050, with the concentration of CO2- equivalent gases (which takes into account all anthropogenic emissions including those of negative warming effect) peaking at 450 parts per million. The current level is about 380ppm, very similar to the concentration of CO2 alone, and therefore the source of some confusion.

Although G8 leaders agreed in 2009 to “reducing emissions of greenhouse gases in aggregate by 80% or more by 2050”, the global target demands that developing countries share the burden by lowering their rising trajectories. This is one of the stumbling blocks: an approach based on equity would concede that poorer countries should be allowed to develop without restriction, just as the richer countries have done.

Agreement is therefore unlikely to be reached unless the Annex 1 countries make medium term commitments of emissions reductions of the order of 25%-40% by 2020. Although the Obama administration is now a willing participant in the process, the American Clean Energy and Security Act has been watered down by the House of Representatives and is struggling to gain acceptance in the Senate. Advance billing of the Copenhagen conference in December 2009 as the final deadline may have created expectations which are unrealistic.

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