Tag: Kyoto Protocol

All nations will suffer the effects of a warmer world, but the world's poorest countries will suffer most from food shortages, rising sea levels, cyclones and drought, the World Bank’s new report on climate change says.

EU environment ministers abandoned plans on Friday (26 October) to limit excess supply of Kyoto-era carbon credits on the world’s markets after seven eastern European states backed Poland’s opposition to the measure.

China is considering price control mechanisms and tightly regulated markets for its emissions trading schemes (ETS) in a bid to avoid the price volatility and scandals that have hit Europe's ETS, as surveys show the country has reached European per-capita emission levels.

Friday’s meeting of EU environment ministers is being pushed to the brink of crisis by a Polish rejection of any mention of the EU's Low Carbon Roadmap for 2050, which foresees up to 95% emissions cuts by mid-century.

An increase in the EU’s carbon emissions reduction target to 30% on 1990 levels within eight years is ‘very fundamental’ to the developing world’s interests, said the European chair of the G77 group of developing nations.

As negotiators and campaigners flew home from the UN climate change summit in Durban, a battle was brewing over the meaning of the hard-fought text that they had signed up to.

As part of the Kyoto Protocol, the United Nations developed a market-based mechanism called Joint Implementation (JI) which allows rich nations to obtain credits for carbon reduction projects in "transition" economies such as Russia, Ukraine and the EU's former communist states. But the system is complex to manage and has yielded little results so far, raising questions about its continuation after Kyoto expires.

European chemical manufacturers are covertly venting huge quantities of the powerful 'super greenhouse gas' HFC-23, according to a study by the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA).

UN talks have run out of time to meet a December 2012 deadline to put in place a binding successor to the Kyoto Protocol on curbing greenhouse gases, the UN's top climate official said on Monday (6 June).

The chief of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) has plainly expressed his fears of failure at "a very critical moment" in the history of UN climate change talks later this autumn. He spoke to EurActiv in an exclusive interview.

Officials are striking increasingly dissonant notes on the question of whether the EU should continue to support the Kyoto Protocol as a framework for UN agreements after 2012 if countries such as Japan, Russia and Canada maintain their opposition.

A price on carbon emissions and bottom-up international cooperation is still needed in order to keep pace with global warming, writes George Soros, chairman of Soros Fund Management and the Open Society Institute.

While moves to develop an EU patent have intensified with the Belgian presidency, which believes it can reach a consensus by the end of the year, a new study shows that three European countries are among the six nations dominating innovation in the clean energy sector.

Bulgaria will be suspended from carbon emissions trading under the Kyoto Protocol as a result of poor transparency and untrustworthiness, the country's environment minister said on 13 May. The decision represents a heavy blow for the government in Sofia, which expected to receive €250m in revenue from the scheme this year, according to Dnevnik, EurActiv's partner publication in Bulgaria.

There are a number of possible methods to include industry in sectoral approaches to tackling climate change – including participation in a consultative body based on a public-private partnership, writes Noriko Fujiwara, research fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), in a May special report.

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said the EU has failed to convince the developing world that it is serious about global warming.

The UN conference in Cancún next December needs to set the basis for a new climate change treaty in 2011, Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), told EurActiv in an exclusive interview.

Hungary's sale of 'used' carbon credits - or 'hot air' as environmentalists call them - had harmed the reputation of cap and trade, an industry lobby said on Friday (20 March), but analysts expected little price impact.

President Barack Obama arrives in Copenhagen today (18 December) for the final day of the UN climate conference on a positive note, after the US pledged to contribute to international climate aid. EurActiv reports from the Danish capital.

As world diplomats struggle to hammer out a climate agreement in Copenhagen, former senior EU negotiator on the Kyoto Protocol Jørgen Knud Henningsen told EurActiv in an interview that the debate on targets is ill-fated. He said leaders would be better off concentrating on the 1992 UN convention ratified by the US and devising policies to achieve the long-term goal of cutting C02 emissions by 80% before 2050. 

Latest estimates show that the EU is set to overshoot its collective emission reduction target under the Kyoto Protocol, the European Commission said yesterday (12 November).

It seems unlikely that a comprehensive climate treaty will be sealed at December's UN conference in Copenhagen despite progress made, but a political agreement is still very much possible, Yvo de Boer, the UN's top climate official, told journalists yesterday (28 October).

The European Union has scaled back plans to give billions of euros to poor countries to persuade them to help battle climate change, putting pressure on developing nations to raise their own contributions to a post-Kyoto agreement later this year.

Ahead of the next round of talks on a post-Kyoto climate agreement, the United Nations has released the first draft of a negotiating text stuffed with options for rich and poor countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which scientists blame for warming the planet.