Kyoto Protocol

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  On the 11th of December 1997, in the ancient Japanese city of Kyoto, delegates from countries spanning nearly every corner of the world signed their names to a document they hoped would change the chemistry of the Earth's atmosphere. The Kyoto Protocol was the first international treaty to impose legally binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions, extending the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It rested on a scientific consensus already firmly in place: that global warming is real, and that human-made carbon dioxide emissions are driving it.

  The treaty asked a fundamental question that had never been settled in international law: who bears responsibility for a problem built up over generations? The answer it arrived at would shape global climate diplomacy for the next two decades. It would also provoke withdrawals, defections, and sharp disputes over fairness that no single conference could resolve.

  Some of those disputes began before the ink was dry. The United States signed the Protocol on the 12th of November 1998 but never sent it to the Senate for ratification. Canada ratified the agreement, then walked away from it in 2012. Russia's eventual ratification in 2004 was the event that finally brought the treaty into legal force. And all the while, global greenhouse gas emissions kept rising, increasing by 32% between 1990 and 2010 even as the Protocol's 36 committed countries cut their own emissions substantially.

  How did an agreement celebrated as a breakthrough leave global emissions climbing? And what did the treaty actually accomplish in the years it was in force?

• 2. The Principle of Differentiation

  ›

  At the first UNFCCC Conference of the Parties, held in Berlin in 1995, a coalition of developing nations pressed for a recognition that would become the treaty's moral foundation. The G-77, which at the time represented 133 developing countries, pushed through what became known as the Berlin Mandate. It acknowledged three points: that developed nations had contributed most to the greenhouse gas concentrations already in the atmosphere; that per-capita emissions in developing countries were still relatively low; and that those emissions would need to grow to meet development needs.

  From this came the Protocol's defining principle: common but differentiated responsibilities. Developed countries bore the obligation to cut emissions first, on the grounds that they were historically responsible for the problem. Developing countries, including China and India, faced no binding reduction targets in the first commitment period.

  This principle was not without controversy. During negotiations, the Alliance of Small Island States, whose survival depended on limiting sea-level rise, pushed for deep uniform cuts across the developed world. The G-77 and China also favored strong, consistent reductions. On the other side, Canada and the United States wanted weaker targets and greater flexibility. The final numbers were the work of Argentinian diplomat Raul Estrada, who chaired the negotiations. He assigned targets based on positions already pledged by parties, the latest negotiating information, and a goal of achieving the strongest possible environmental outcome.

  The targets that emerged varied widely. Germany and Denmark were required to reduce emissions by 21% below 1990 levels. Australia was permitted to increase its emissions by 8%. The United States was assigned a 7% reduction but never ratified the agreement.

• 3. Flexibility Mechanisms

  ›

  Three tools defined how countries could meet their targets without relying solely on domestic cuts. Together they were called the flexibility mechanisms: International Emissions Trading, the Clean Development Mechanism, and Joint Implementation.

  International Emissions Trading allowed countries to buy and sell their assigned emission allowances, called Assigned Amount Units. The logic was economic: the cost of cutting one tonne of emissions differs enormously between countries, and trading lets reductions happen where they are cheapest. In practice, the largest surplus of allowances sat with Russia, which held an estimated 3.1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent that it had not used. Countries from the former Eastern Bloc carried similar surpluses, stemming from the economic collapse that followed the end of the Soviet Union. Some of these nations viewed the surplus as compensation for economic trauma. Others called it "hot air," a term Russia found, as the source notes, "quite offensive."

  The Clean Development Mechanism directed investment into emissions-cutting projects in developing countries. Between 2001 and 2012, the CDM was projected to produce around 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in reductions, mainly through renewable energy, energy efficiency, and fuel switching. China was expected to account for 52% of the certified emission reductions produced; India for 16%; Brazil for 7%.

  Joint Implementation worked similarly but within Annex I countries. Its formal crediting period did not begin until January 2008. As of November 2008, only 22 JI projects had been officially approved and registered. Russia accounted for roughly two-thirds of the projected emission savings from JI, with the remainder split between Ukraine and the EU's newer member states.

  In 2010, trade in allowances under all these mechanisms was dwarfed by the European Union Emission Trading Scheme, which drove 97% of the international carbon market's total value.

• 4. Ratification and Its Complications

  ›

  Article 25 of the Protocol set a precise condition for the treaty to enter into force: it required ratification by at least 55 countries, and those countries had to account for at least 55% of the 1990 carbon dioxide emissions from Annex I nations. The first threshold was crossed on the 23rd of May 2002 when Iceland ratified. The second threshold was far harder to clear without the United States, which had accounted for 36.1% of 1990 Annex I emissions.

  Russia's ratification on the 18th of November 2004 supplied the missing percentage and brought the treaty into legal force on the 16th of February 2005, ninety days later as the Protocol required. The first Meeting of the Parties was held in Montreal from the 28th of November to the 9th of December 2005.

  The US never reached that point. The Clinton administration had signed the Protocol, but the Senate had already passed the Byrd-Hagel Resolution in 1997 by a vote of 95-0, signaling its refusal to accept any agreement that did not bind developing countries to reductions. The treaty was never submitted for ratification. When President George W. Bush took office, he formally opposed the Protocol, stating in a letter dated the 13th of March 2001 that he believed it was "an unfair and ineffective means of addressing global climate change concerns" and citing potential harm to the US economy.

  Canada's path was different. Canada ratified the Protocol, then fell further behind its commitment with every passing year. The country had pledged to reduce emissions to 6% below 1990 levels by 2012, but by 2009 its emissions were 17% above the 1990 baseline. The Harper government, which had prioritized oil sands development in Alberta, announced on the 12th of December 2011 that Canada would formally withdraw, effective the 15th of December 2012. Canada was the first signatory to withdraw. Environment minister Peter Kent cited the risk of enormous financial penalties as a reason for leaving.

• 5. Compliance and Its Limits

  ›

  When the first commitment period ran from 2008 to 2012, all 36 countries that remained fully committed to the Protocol did comply. Their average annual emissions over those years fell 24.2% below 1990 levels, far exceeding the aggregate target of a 4.2% reduction. Nine countries, including Austria, Denmark, Japan, Norway, and Switzerland, could not meet their targets through domestic cuts alone and resorted to the flexibility mechanisms to buy credits from countries with surplus allowances.

  The large aggregate reduction was driven heavily by events that preceded the treaty. The collapse of the Soviet Union caused emissions across the Eastern Bloc to fall by roughly 40% between 1990 and 1999 as heavy industry contracted. The 2008 financial crisis delivered an additional reduction during the commitment period itself.

  Countries that fell short of their targets faced a specific consequence: they were required to make up the difference during the second commitment period, plus an additional 30%, and were suspended from selling emissions credits. The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research noted in 2001 that these enforcement mechanisms were weak compared to domestic law, and scholars later described the first-round commitments as "modest."

  The broader accounting exposed the treaty's structural limitation. The 36 committed countries accounted for only 24% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2010. Emissions in China had risen by more than 10% in some years during the 1990-2005 period. The global total kept climbing because the treaty left the fastest-growing emitters without binding limits, a design choice rooted in the Berlin Mandate's principle but one that undercut the treaty's environmental effect.

  In 2001, seventeen national science academies described ratification as a "small but essential first step" toward stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, a characterization that summarized both the achievement and the remaining distance.

• 6. The Doha Extension and Paris Successor

  ›

  A second commitment period was negotiated at Doha in December 2012 and extended the Protocol to 2020. Thirty-seven countries took on binding targets in this period: Australia, the European Union and its member states, Belarus, Iceland, Kazakhstan, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland, and Ukraine, among others. Japan, New Zealand, and Russia declined new targets. Canada had already withdrawn. The second period applied to roughly 11% of annual global greenhouse gas emissions.

  New Zealand's climate minister Tim Groser described the fifteen-year-old Protocol as outdated and said New Zealand was looking for a replacement that would include developing nations. Non-profit organisations including the World Wildlife Fund criticized the decision to pull out.

  The Doha Amendment entered into force on the 31st of December 2020, the same day the second commitment period expired, after being accepted by at least 144 states. Of the 37 parties with binding targets, 34 had ratified.

  Negotiations over what would come next ran through successive annual UNFCCC conferences. A non-binding outline agreed in the Washington Declaration on the 16th of February 2007 had envisioned a global cap-and-trade system covering both industrialized and developing nations, with a hoped-for start date of 2009. That timeline slipped. The Copenhagen conference of December 2009 was expected to produce a binding successor but ended without one. The 2010 Cancun agreements brought 76 countries together in voluntary pledges; those countries accounted for 85% of annual global emissions.

  The Paris Agreement emerged from the 2015 climate summit. Unlike the Kyoto Protocol, it was a separate instrument under the UNFCCC rather than an amendment, and it drew in major emitters including the United States and China on terms the Kyoto architecture had never achieved. The diplomatic path from Kyoto's Berlin Mandate in 1995 to the Paris text in 2015 traced twenty years of negotiation over the same underlying question: how to share the burden of a planetary problem among nations at vastly different stages of development.