Last week marked the 25th anniversary of the Toronto Conference, a “perfect storm” of events that launched the issue of climate change onto the global policy agenda. So what happened in international environmental diplomacy over the past 25 years?

After three years of deliberations following the Toronto Conference, the International Negotiating Committee (INC) on climate change drafted a text to be signed in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in June 1992 as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The objective of the treaty is to “stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” The treaty itself set no binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions for individual countries and contains no enforcement mechanisms. Instead, the treaty provides a framework for negotiating specific international treaties (called “protocols”) that may set binding limits on greenhouse gases. Presently, 195 Parties have signed and ratified the UNFCCC.

Five years after the drafting of the UNFCCC, the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997 to place legally binding limitations/reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases in two commitment periods for many developed countries. The first commitment period applies to emissions between 2008 and 2012, and the second commitment period applies to emissions between 2013 and 2020. Presently, there are 192 parties to the protocol, including all UN members, except Andorra, Canada, South Sudan and the United States.  The United States signed but did not ratify the Protocol and Canada withdrew from it in 2011. The Kyoto targets varied among nations. Some nations were allowed to increase their emissions by a certain amount; others were required to make significant cuts. The average target was a cut of around 5% relative to 1990 levels by 2012. According to standard data, developed countries can claim to have reduced their collective emissions by almost 2% between 1990 and 2012.

Many have argued these numbers as cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by developed countries since 1990 have been cancelled out many times over by increases in imported goods from developing countries such as China. Under the Kyoto protocol, emissions released during production of goods are assigned to the country where production takes place, rather than where goods are consumed. Once the carbon cost of imports have been added to each developed country, and exports subtracted – the true change in greenhouse gas emissions from developed nations since 1990 has been an increase of 7%.

The Kyoto protocol was amended in 2012 to accommodate the second commitment period, but this amendment has not entered into legal force. The USA, Japan, Russia, Canada and New Zealand have indicated they would not sign up to a second Kyoto commitment period unless developing nations signed up as well. The Kyoto second commitment period applies to about 15% of annual global emissions of greenhouse gases. At the 2012 UNFCC/Kyoto protocol meeting of the Parties in Doha, Qatar,   an agreement was reached to extend the Kyoto Protocol to 2020, and to set a deadline of 2015 for the development of a successor document, to be implemented from 2020 forward.

The international climate negotiations have not been very effective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions – the major force behind climate change – and are now stalled.

Tomorrow, we’ll discuss a way ahead in addressing climate change.

Questions? Contact Adam Fenech at afenech@upei.ca or (902) 620-5220