EU welcomes Kyoto Protocol

The Climate Change Protocol, better known as the Kyoto Protocol, came into force yesterday.

Welcoming this "historic agreement", the European Commission said it gave the international community its most powerful instrument yet to combat global climate change.

Industrialised countries that have ratified the protocol are now legally obliged to meet their targets for limiting or reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2012. The EU has already made this binding for member states under EU law although for the current agreement Malta is excluded.

The Kyoto Protocol is a set of rules forming part of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, whose ultimate objective is to stabilise global greenhouse gas emissions at a level that would prevent dangerous human-induced interference with the climate system.

Under Kyoto, the EU-15 member states made a commitment to reduce their overall emissions of the six greenhouse gases controlled by the protocol to eight per cent below the 1990 level by 2012. Each country has an individual target set under a "burden-sharing" agreement.

The rest of EU members, except for Malta and Cyprus, have set individual reduction targets of six or eight per cent.

Malta has no emissions reduction targets because it did not form part of the Kyoto Protocol signed in 1997. However, now that it forms part of the EU, it would be expected to start giving its contribution as from 2012 when a new agreement will come into force.

Since it was agreed in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol has been ratified by 140 countries plus the European Community, thus covering 80 per cent of the world's population. Its entry into force comes 90 days after Russia handed its ratification to the United Nations on November 18.

The European Commission said that in addition to the emission reduction targets, the entry into force of Kyoto will also mark the beginning of a global carbon market, with links to the EU emission trading scheme that began on January 1. This is expected to stimulate investment in emissions-saving projects around the world which industrialised countries can use to help meet their targets. These instruments provide cost-effective ways to meet targets by using flexible mechanisms provided for under the Protocol.