"Climate saviour" EU calls world to ratify Kyoto
Date: 29-Oct-01
Country: EU
Author: Robin Pomeroy
The 15-country European Union has styled itself as the saviour of the Kyoto Protocol on cutting greenhouse gases which the United States pulled out of in March. But the EU needs the support of most other industrialised countries to bring the deal into force.
Belgian energy minister Olivier Deleuze said international climate talks that start in Marrakesh, Morocco, today must result in a legally binding text spelling out Kyoto's rules, clearly showing its economic impact on participants.
"If we come to an agreement in Marrakesh then it will be quite difficult for countries to say they don't have enough information to say whether they will ratify or not," Deleuze told Reuters in an interview.
Belgium currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU, which represents the 15-nation bloc at international talks.
The ground-breaking pact agreed in Japan's ancient capital Kyoto in 1997 set legally binding limits on industrialised countries' greenhouse gases which many scientists say trap heat into the atmosphere risking catastrophic climate changes.
But due to numerous complex questions left unanswered in Kyoto, such as what role forests should play in soaking up the key greenhouse gas carbon dioxide and how emissions trading might work, no major industrialised country has yet ratified.
After the Kyoto signatories reached a political compromise on these issues in Bonn in July, the EU said it would ratify Kyoto next year. Key countries like Japan, Canada and Russia have been less equivocal, a situation Deleuze hopes will change.
CLOSED DOOR
A leading light of Belgium's French-speaking ecology party, Deleuze said he was determined the Marrakesh talks would not further water down the Kyoto targets which, he says, were already compromised in Bonn as countries jockeyed for gains.
"We are not renegotiating the Kyoto Protocol," he said. "I don't want to open any door that was closed at Bonn."
Kyoto foresaw a five percent reduction of industrialised countries' greenhouse gas emissions by 2012.
Deleuze said the Bonn agreement, with its allowances for offsetting some reductions against vegetation acting as carbon "sinks", effectively reduced this to 2.5 or three percent.
There would be no further reduction, he said, although he expected Russia - to push for a greater sinks allowance.
As for the United States, which with one quarter of the world's man-made greenhouse emissions is the biggest polluter, Deleuze said he did not expect a return to Kyoto.
"If the United States has the same behaviour as they had in Bonn, that will be fine by me," he said.
The United States, which will attend Marrakesh as a party to the 1992 U.N. framework convention on climate change which spawned Kyoto, has said it would not disrupt other countries' progress on the pact unless it risked damaging U.S. interests.
Although the hijacked airliner attacks on New York and Washington and the subsequent "war on terrorism" have hogged the headlines since September 11, Deleuze said climate change would remain a crucial issue for international diplomacy.
"I am not convinced (climate change) is less important because of September 11, maybe it is even more important."
