Kyoto Protocol (1997): The First Binding Climate Change Treaty

The Kyoto Protocol is the international climate treaty adopted in Kyoto, Japan, on 11 December 1997. It was the first agreement to set legally binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions, requiring industrialised countries to cut their combined emissions by about 5 percent below 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012. It created the first international carbon markets, but the refusal of the United States to join and the absence of targets for fast-growing developing economies limited its impact.

Background

At the Earth Summit in Rio in June 1992, governments signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It set a long-term goal of avoiding dangerous human interference with the climate but contained no binding emission cuts, only a voluntary aim for developed countries to return their emissions to 1990 levels by 2000.

It soon became clear that most rich countries would miss that aim. At the first Conference of the Parties (COP1) in Berlin in 1995, governments agreed the “Berlin Mandate”, launching talks on binding targets for developed countries, while explicitly exempting developing countries from new commitments. In 1995 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) also reported that the balance of evidence suggested a discernible human influence on global climate.

Negotiations in Kyoto

The third Conference of the Parties (COP3) met at the Kyoto International Conference Hall from 1 to 11 December 1997, with Hiroshi Oki, head of Japan’s Environment Agency, as president. Positions were far apart. The European Union proposed a 15 percent cut for the main greenhouse gases by 2010; Japan suggested about 5 percent; the United States wanted only to stabilise emissions at 1990 levels in 2008-2012.

The US Senate had already signalled deep scepticism. In July 1997 it passed the Byrd-Hagel Resolution by 95 votes to 0, declaring that the United States should not sign any agreement that excluded binding commitments for developing countries or would seriously harm the American economy.

Vice-President Al Gore flew to Kyoto on 8 December and instructed the US delegation to show more flexibility. The chair of the main negotiating committee, the Argentine diplomat Raúl Estrada-Oyuela, drove the talks through all-night sessions. The protocol was finally adopted on the morning of 11 December, a day after the scheduled close.

What the protocol said

The protocol covered six greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulphur hexafluoride. Some three dozen industrialised and former communist countries, together with the European Community, listed in Annex B, accepted individual targets for the first commitment period, 2008 to 2012.

The EU was allowed to share out its joint target among its member states, an arrangement known as the “bubble”. Developing countries, including China and India, took on no binding targets, in line with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities agreed at Rio.

Carbon markets: the flexibility mechanisms

To make targets cheaper to meet, the protocol introduced three market-based “flexibility mechanisms”, largely at the insistence of the United States:

• International emissions trading, allowing countries with targets to buy and sell emission allowances.
• Joint Implementation, under which developed countries could earn credits from projects in other developed or transition economies.
• The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which allowed developed countries to earn credits by financing emission-cutting projects in developing countries.

Forests and other carbon “sinks” could also count. The detailed rules took years to settle, culminating in the Marrakesh Accords of 2001. The European Union built its own Emissions Trading System, launched in 2005, partly to meet its Kyoto commitment, and the CDM went on to register thousands of projects, many of them in China and India.

The United States stays out

The Clinton administration signed the protocol in November 1998 but, knowing it could not win the two-thirds Senate majority needed, never submitted it for ratification. In March 2001 President George W. Bush announced that the United States would not implement it, citing the cost to the economy and the lack of obligations for developing countries.

Without the United States, then the world’s largest emitter, entry into force required the ratification of Russia. The protocol needed 55 parties, including developed countries responsible for at least 55 percent of developed-country carbon dioxide emissions in 1990. Russia ratified in November 2004, and the Kyoto Protocol entered into force on 16 February 2005.

Results and later history

As a group, the countries with targets cut their emissions by considerably more than 5 percent over the first period. Much of that reduction, however, came from the economic collapse of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, which left large amounts of unused allowances, sometimes called “hot air”. Canada, facing a large overshoot of its target, withdrew from the protocol in December 2011.

Meanwhile global emissions rose rapidly, driven by economic growth in China, India and other developing countries without targets. China overtook the United States as the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the mid-2000s.

The Doha Amendment of 2012 created a second commitment period from 2013 to 2020, but Japan, Russia and New Zealand did not take on new targets and it entered into force only on 31 December 2020. After the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009 to agree a successor treaty, governments adopted the Paris Agreement in 2015, which replaced top-down targets with national pledges from every country.

Debates and criticism

From the start the protocol was attacked from two directions. Opponents in the United States and Australia argued that it would damage their economies while letting rapidly growing emitters such as China and India off the hook. Many environmental groups and scientists replied that the targets were far too modest: even if fully met, a cut of about 5 percent in rich-country emissions would barely slow the rise in global concentrations.

The carbon markets were also controversial. Critics argued that some Clean Development Mechanism projects would have happened anyway, and that credits for destroying industrial gases such as HFC-23 rewarded factories that produced the gas in the first place. Supporters pointed out that the mechanism channelled private investment into renewable energy and energy efficiency in developing countries and gave many governments their first experience of measuring emissions.

Australia, which had won a generous target, signed in 1998 but ratified only in December 2007, under a new government.

Timeline

• 1992, June: The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is signed at the Rio Earth Summit.
• 1995, April: COP1 in Berlin adopts the Berlin Mandate.
• 1997, 25 July: The US Senate passes the Byrd-Hagel Resolution 95-0.
• 1997, 11 December: The Kyoto Protocol is adopted at COP3.
• 1998, 12 November: The United States signs the protocol.
• 2001, March: President George W. Bush rejects the protocol.
• 2001, November: The Marrakesh Accords set out detailed rules.
• 2005, 16 February: The protocol enters into force after Russia’s ratification.
• 2008-2012: First commitment period.
• 2012, December: The Doha Amendment creates a second commitment period to 2020.

Why it matters

The Kyoto Protocol was the first time governments accepted legally binding limits on the gases that drive climate change. It fell far short of halting global warming, but it built the systems of emissions accounting, reporting and carbon trading that later climate policy relies on, and its shortcomings shaped the different approach of the Paris Agreement.