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The long road from Kyoto

2003; Nature Portfolio; Volume: 426; Issue: 6968 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1038/426756a

1476-4687

Quirin Schiermeier,

Climate Change Communication and Perception

E nvironmentalists may remember 2003 as the year in which the Kyoto Protocol died.But even if the international community's first attempt at tackling climate change is in terminal decline, this isn't necessarily a defeat for the planet: it might force people to look more realistically at our ability to slow down -and adapt to -the changing climate.The Kyoto Protocol, agreed in 1997, aims to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to 5% below 1990 levels by 2012.Although 120 nations are now on board, to come into effect, the treaty must be ratified by a group of countries that together accounted for at least 55% of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions in 1990.The United States, the single biggest emitter, pulled out of the agreement in 2001, leaving only Russia capable of breathing life into the protocol.As Nature went to press, this looked very unlikely to happen.Russian President Vladimir Putin made half-hearted remarks about the treaty at the World Climate Change Conference in Moscow in September.And this month, at a meeting of parties to the Kyoto Protocol in Milan, high-level advisers to the Russian government said that the country would not ratify the protocol, at least in its current form, because it would stifle Russia's economic growth.In the slump that followed the collapse of communism, Russia's greenhouse-gas emissions fell after 1990, giving it a lot of unused 'allowable' emissions that could be sold as 'carbon credits'to other governments.But Russia's emissions, along with its economy, are now on the rise again.Without bankable unused emissions, and without US customers to buy these carbon credits, it looks ever more likely that Russia will say no to the treaty altogether."The common view here is that Kyoto doesn't live any more," says economist Henry Jacoby, who co-directs the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change."It was a heroic effort,but it will simply not work the way it was conceived.It will be necessary to go back,rethink the various elements of the agreement,and start again."The hope of many is that most of the individual commitments thrashed out during the Kyoto negotiations will live on even if the protocol dies, such as the voluntary commit-