The officials from around the world who will gather in South Africa today to convene the latest round of U.N. climate negotiations are facing an uncomfortable fact: The global pact that has dictated greenhouse-gas targets since 1997 may no longer be relevant.
The mandatory targets of the Kyoto Protocol cover less than a third of the world’s carbon output. Major emitters are not bound by it. And the world is relying on a patchwork of measures rather than a universal treaty to lessen impacts of global warming.
The Kyoto agreement won’t die altogether in Durban; it may be extended for another five years without binding commitments from industrialized nations while programs for international carbon offsets are preserved as a way to compensate for emissions.
Delegates to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change will focus largely on technical details, such as how to administer a future fund to help poor nations adapt to global warming and how to transfer clean technology to developed nations.
But the debates over concrete policies to cut greenhouse-gas emissions over the next decade are happening in places such as the Australian Parliament and California’s Air Resources Board.
James Connaughton, chair of the Council on Environmental Quality under President George W. Bush, said Kyoto’s global, top-down strategy has been replaced by an incremental approach to emissions.
“The situation has never been weaker for that vision” of a global approach, said Connaughton, now executive vice president for corporate affairs, public and environmental policy for Constellation Energy. “On the other hand, there’s been quite a lot of progress bottom-up, country by country, in terms of setting reasonably ambitious goals and time frames” for cutting greenhouse gases.
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