After all-night negotiations in Bonn, almost 180 nations have reached agreement on how to begin tackling climate change. Politicians greeted the global deal as historic, believing it will salvage the Kyoto Protocol and pave the way for targeted reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to pass into law.
However, European environment ministers have been forced into accepting a compromise with other industrialised nations that is weaker than the one they rejected just eight months ago.
“I prefer an imperfect agreement that is living to a perfect agreement that doesn’t exist,” said the EU’s chief negotiator Olivier Deleuze of Belgium.
According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, the concessions on the use of forests as sinks for carbon dioxide could reduce the effective cut in emissions from the 5.2 per cent agreed in Kyoto to just 1.8 per cent.
The new deal retains the targets for countries to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases that were agreed in Kyoto four years ago. But the sting lies in the critical “rule book” that accompanies the raw targets. The rules agreed on Monday are significantly less strict than those on offer last November, at the previous round of talks, in The Hague.
Then, negotiations collapsed in acrimony after EU chief negotiator Dominique Voynet of France rejected an overnight deal brokered with the US by British deputy prime minister John Prescott.
The sticking point was how much countries with large areas of forests could offset increases in greenhouse gas emissions by claiming to have soaked up the excess in trees through improved forest management.
The new US government pulled out of the talks but Canada, Japan and other forested nations held out for even higher offsets in Bonn. They played on the EU’s desperation to keep the Kyoto Protocol alive.
Scientists say the forest clauses could become a loophole because it will be hard to be sure whether the claimed offsets are real – or merely a continuance of existing forestry policies.
This time, too, Japan, rejected proposals for penalties against countries which miss their targets. After this become the final hurdle over night, the EU agreed to put off discussions on compliance to another day.
Nonetheless there is relief that, despite pessimism before the meeting, the talks did not end in another failure. This proved the US wrong – it had predicting the protocol would collapse without it – meaning the world’s largest polluter may be forced to rejoin later.
Environmental campaign groups have rallied round the new agreement. At the Hague in November, long-time lobbyist Bill Hare of Greenpeace had declared: “No deal is better than a bad deal.” But this time he took a more pragmatic line: “When one questions whether the watered down version is worth it, ask yourself who fought most violently against it. The answer is OPEC, the fossil fuel industry and, of course, the United States.”
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