Kyoto Protocol

United Nations and Climate Change

The global climate change regime, centered around the United Nations (UN), represents one of the most ambitious projects in the history of international environmental law. In 1988, responding to concerns from scientists and environmental groups, the World Meteorological Organization and the UN Environmental Program (UNEP) established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a multinational group of scientists and other experts, to survey existing studies on global warming and to present their findings to governments. In 1990, the IPCC reported that global warming did pose a threat and was likely the result of human activities.

Thus, in the context of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (commonly known as the Earth Summit) in Rio de Janeiro, UN member states negotiated the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), the first international treaty to address the issue. The FCCC sets the objective of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and requires industrialized countries to inventory their emissions. The FCCC promotes the “precautionary principle,” the idea that lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as an excuse for inaction. It also recognizes the notion of “common but differentiated responsibility”; while all countries have a responsibility to tackle climate change, the industrialized nations, given their historical responsibility and greater means, should bear a greater share of the burden than their developing country counterparts.

However, the FCCC was vague and imposed no binding commitments on states. In 1995, parties to the FCCC embarked on negotiations to create an additional agreement with specific limits on greenhouse gas emissions. Years of intense negotiations resulted in a new treaty, adopted in Kyoto, Japan, on December 11, 1997. The Kyoto Protocol sets targets for 39 industrialized countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 2012, with an average reduction of just over 5 percent below the established baseline levels of 1990. Many of the details on how to implement the protocol were left to future negotiations, which were completed in 2001 with the signing of the Marrakech Accords.

In order for the protocol to enter into force—to become binding international law—two criteria were established. First, at least 55 states would have to ratify. Ratification is the domestic legal process by which countries formally accept their treaty commitments. Second, these ratifications would have to constitute at least 55 percent of industrial nations' total emissions of greenhouse gasses. While the first threshold was crossed early on, several large emitters, including the United States (36 percent of industrial emissions), Japan (8.5 percent), Russia (17 percent), and Canada (3.3 percent) faced substantial domestic political obstacles to ratification. In March of 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush pronounced the treaty “fatally flawed,” and withdrew his government from the Kyoto process. With strong European Union (EU) leadership and Russia's ratification in late 2004, enough emissions were covered to achieve [Page 997]the second threshold for entry into force, which went into effect shortly thereafter.

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