Isramart : Yvo de Boer calls for Kyoto Protocol extension to help carbon markets

Isramart news:


THE Kyoto Protocol should continue at least until another global climate change treaty can be negotiated and brought into effect, a key UN official said, as the Copenhagen talks bogged down over the legal form of a new agreement.

Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change - the bedrock international agreement upon which the 1997 Kyoto Protocol is built - said the Kyoto Protocol would have to be extended until after its 2012 end date in order to keep international carbon markets going.

“I think the Kyoto Protocol should survive and must survive for a number of reasons,” Mr de Boer said.

“It would be working towards a second period under Kyoto and a new treaty under the convention. That new treaty under the convention would enter into force when enough countries have ratified it.”

The form of a new agreement is one of the fundamental sticking points at the talks - with the United States refusing to join a second stage of the Kyoto Protocol and China and developing nations resisting suggestions that they sign on to either the Kyoto Protocol or another legally binding agreement.This issue has effectively stalled the talks for two days after the tiny island state of Tuvalu's insisted that negotiators talk about a legally binding agreement that would include developing economies.

With only two days of negotiations remaining before the two main strands of the Copenhagen talks are supposed to be reporting back to ministers, progress has been glacial, reinforcing the widespread view that a successful deal will depend on the more than 100 world leaders who will attend at the end of next week.

Climate Change Minister Senator Penny Wong said negotiators should be concentrating on the content of an agreement.

“My view is the key issue is the effect, we can (get) locked in to an arid discussion about legal form, it is the effect of the legal form which is important,” she said.

She said Australia's preference was for a single new binding agreement for all countries, but a continued Kyoto Protocol and another binding agreement covering the United States and developing countries was also possible.

But she said developing economies, particularly China, had to put their emission reduction commitments into some form of binding agreement which allowed for them to be checked and verified.

“Some form of internationalisation of China's commitment is going to be needed for their to be a comprehensive agreement,” she said.

But the G77 group of developing countries persisted in their demands that the US sign the Kyoto Protocol, something the Obama administration has made it clear it will not do.

“USA is the world's largest emitter historically and per capita. We ask USA to join the Kyoto Protocol and take on commitments comparable to (industrialised countries),” said Sundanese negotiators and G77 spokesman Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping.