“I am convinced that climate change, and what we do about it, will define us, our era, and ultimately the global legacy we leave for future generations. We hold the future in our hands.
Together, we must ensure that our grandchildren will not have to ask why we failed to do the right thing, and let them suffer the consequences.” -Ban Ki-Moon, UN Secretary-General

COP 101

At the Earth Summit in 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was signed. The ultimate objection of this Convention is to prevent dangerous climate change (Article 2). Industrialized countries agreed to stabilize their greenhouse gas emissions at 1990 levels by 2000; however this wasn’t a binding target. By 1995 it was obvious that more needed to be done to adequately address climate change. So countries agreed to start negotiations on a Protocol. These talks culminated in the Kyoto Protocol in Kyoto, Japan in 1997. As part of the checks and balances of international negotiations, any agreements signed by a country at the international level must be ratified by that nation’s government at home. Enough countries, representing enough of the industrialized country emissions, ratified the Kyoto Protocol so that it finally came into force (i.e. became legally binding) on February 16, 2005 (yeah!). The Kyoto Protocol stipulates industrialized countries must, on the whole, reduce their emissions by 5.2% below 1990 levels (though countries may have different individual targets – Canada’s is 6%). These reductions must be done between 2008-2012; this period is referred to as the first commitment period. The climate meeting in Bali in 2007 was crucial as governments had to agree to begin negotiating the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol. It took two years to negotiate Kyoto (and 8 years to ratify it). In order to ensure that these negotiations on the second commitment period were finished in time to ratify them before 2012, these negotiations would need to conclude in December 2009. Industrialized countries began talking about their possible future commitments in Montreal in 2005, but we need to speed up the process! Kyoto is only the first small step towards action on climate change at the international level. The longer we wait to take meaningful action, the harder it will be to avoid dangerous climate change.