Kyoto Protocol
In an effort to mitigate (meaning to reduce or make less severe) many of the problems associated with human-induced amplification of the greenhouse effect and climate change, including the impacts on island nations and states, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted and opened for signing in 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit. The convention called for signatory countries to strive to return their individual CO2 emissions back to 1990 levels by the year 2000 and also established the Conference of Parties (COP). The United States refused to make the terms of the agreement legally binding. In 1994, it was decided that the Convention would enter into force 90 days after the receipt of the 50th ratification. In 1995, the first Convention of Parties (COP-1) took place in Berlin with delegates agreeing that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change proposed greenhouse reductions commitments were inadequate, but no agreement was reached over new emission targets. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change climate scientists released their Second Assessment Report in 1995 and these findings become a major impetus for negotiations that eventually resulted in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol is a legally binding international agreement that commits signatory countries to reducing their global emissions of greenhouse gases. The Kyoto Protocol becomes legally binding when ratified by 55 nations and in addition that these nations represent 55% of the 1990 carbon dioxide emissions by the 39 industrialized countries. As of mid-2004, 122 countries representing 44% of the total 1990 carbon dioxide emissions had signed the protocol. There were thus more than enough countries that had ratified the agreement for it to go into effect, but these nations did not represent 55% of the 1990 carbon dioxide emissions. At that time, both the United States and Russia had not ratified the Kyoto Protocol and one of the two nations needed to ratify it before the 55% of the 1990 carbon dioxide emission goal could be met and the Kyoto Protocol would become a globally binding agreement. This is because of these nations’ relative contributions to the 1990 carbon dioxide emissions (United States = 36% of 1990 emissions; Russia = 17% of 1990 emissions).
In 2001, the United States stated it would not sign the agreement – even though the U.S. government accepts climate change as a fact – because of the restrictions it felt the protocol placed on industry and world economic growth. The U.S. instead is promoting policies meant to support new and emerging energy and climate protection technologies. Russia initially indicated it would sign the agreement, retracted that promise, and then sent mixed signals about its intentions. It too, as the U.S., took the stance that if the Kyoto Protocol was enacted, it would retard future economic growth. In a turn of events though, Russia announced in late 2004 that they were going to ratify the agreement. On November 18, 2004 the 90 day countdown to the Kyoto Protocol’s entry into force was triggered by the receipt of the Russian Federation’s instrument of ratification by the United Nations Secretary-General. The Protocol became legally binding on its then 128 Parties on February 16, 2005. The developing countries are not included within the protocol, despite the fact that greenhouse gas emissions from these countries will exceed those of the developed, industrialized world by 2010. The Kyoto Protocol requires that the 39 industrialized nations involved in the protocol reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by a specified annual percentage of their 1990 emissions by 2008-2012. The average overall reduction is targeted to be approximately 5%, but the percentages vary from country to country – e.g., U.S. is 7%, European Union is 8%, New Zealand is no change. Australia and New Zealand are allowed to increase their emissions by 8 and 10%, respectively. As of May 2006, the United States has yet to sign the Kyoto Protocol.
The emissions of the following six gases are included in the protocol: carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrous oxide (NOx), methane (CH4), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6). Each country’s emission limit is based on a greenhouse forcing-weighted sum of the six gases, which takes into account the relative impact and abundance that each of the six gases has on global warming. Sinks for gases are also included in the protocol. An example is that if a country demonstrates that carbon is being stored in its forests because of planting trees, this carbon storage will be entered as a negative value into the country’s net emissions counting as a reduction and credit against emissions. Because the protocol will influence most major sectors of the world economy, it is considered to be the most far-reaching agreement on environment and sustainable development ever adopted.
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, based on the 1990 and 1995 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, is necessarily global in scope. The regional effects of a future enhanced greenhouse effect on climate variables of temperature, precipitation, storm variability, and on sea level rise, etc. are difficult to resolve with global models due to their course spatial resolution. In other words, the global climate models look at large global space scale changes and do not have the resolution to look at regional and local effects. An analogy would be that if you are taking pictures of a beach, your camera (the global climate model) will be able to resolve the beach (the global climate space scale), but not the individual grains of sands (regional and local climate space scale). So, in conjunction with global models, regional models have to be constructed that can not only take into account global processes, but also regional to local one to resolve changes on the regional space scale.
In 2001, The Pacific Islands Regional Assessment Group (PIRAG) on behalf of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) published the report Preparing for a changing climate: The potential consequences of climate variability and change. The Pacific Islands Regional Assessment Group focused on the consequences of climate variability and change on the American Flag Pacific Islands including Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), and the U.S.-affiliated Pacific Islands, which include the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM: Yap, Pohnpei, Kosrae and Chuuk), the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), and the Republic of Palau (Figure 16).
Figure 16. Pacific Island Map.
In the Pacific Islands Regional Assessment Group report, the effects of changing climate on sea-surface temperatures, precipitation, and sea level in the Pacific region were modeled using two models: the Canadian Center for Climate Modeling and Analysis (CGCM1) and a similar general circulation model used by the United Kingdom’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research (HADCM2). The CGCM1 and HADCM2 results were compared to two model results (A2 and B2) generated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES). Both of these models are capable of resolving regional scale processes, which makes them useful for discussing future climate impacts on Pacific Islands.