Kyoto climate talks face new hurdle
Date: 02-Nov-01
Country: MOROCCO
Author: Robin Pomeroy
Conference documents circulated at U.N. talks in Marrakesh showed Japan, Russia, Canada and Australia, less enthusiastic about the pact than the European Union, had proposed that rules to enforce compliance with national targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions should not be decided on until 2003.
EU leaders have been trying to save the 1997 Kyoto Protocol since the world's biggest polluter, the United States, rejected it in March. They hope ministers from some 160 nations can agree a legally binding treaty when they gather in Morocco next week.
But some environmental campaigners, who see the pact as a vital first step in slowing climate change, said the sceptics were trying to retreat from a last-gasp compromise reached with the Europeans at ministerial talks in Bonn, Germany in July.
"They are going back on the decision of their ministers to adopt a binding compliance system in Marrakesh," Jennifer Morgan of the World Wildlife Fund told Reuters at the conference.
"O think they are trying to move away from a binding compliance system by delaying a decision as long as possible."
Officials from the 160 or so nations are in Marrakesh to finalise a treaty based on that Bonn political agreement so that their ministers can approve it next week and send it back to their national parliaments for ratification.
President George W. Bush withdrew Washington's support for Kyoto in March, questioning the science behind it and saying its binding targets could hurt the U.S. economy. He did, however, commit to tackling the problems of climate change.
Without the United States, the treaty must be ratified by just about every other industrial state to take legal effect.
CORNERSTONE
The Kyoto pact is the first treaty to set legally binding limits on emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases which trap heat in the atmosphere with what many scientists say could be disastrous consequences for the world's weather systems.
The legally binding nature of Kyoto - which commits industrialised countries to reduce their emissions to an average of five percent below 1990 levels by 2012 - is seen by its supporters and detractors alike as a cornerstone of the pact.
Under the Bonn agreement, for every tonne of emissions a country misses its target by, it would have to make up for the shortfall in a second commitment period, after 2012, at a penalty rate of 1.3 tonnes.
A country failing to comply would also lose its right to take part in emissions trading - a system of buying more virtuous states' "licences to pollute" - and other "flexible mechanisms". It would also have to set out an action plan demonstrating how it can get emissions down to meet its target.
Greenpeace slammed the move to delay a deal on compliance by the four countries which were allied with the United States when Washington was still playing an active part in negotiations.
"If there was one thing that remained in at Bonn it was compliance," the environmental group's Bill Hare told a news conference. "Virtually everything else was shot to pieces."