German Advisory Council on Global Change - WBGU

Deutsch

Mission

Publications

Council Members

Secretariat

Contact

PRESS RELEASE

Decisive breakthrough in climate negotiations: Despite disturbing watering down results welcomed   Berlin, July 23, 2001. The outcomes of the Bonn climate negotiations have been welcomed by the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) as a decisive breakthrough in international environmental politics. "What matters most is that the international community sticks with the process of climate negotiations begun in 1992 and that the politics of refusal exercised by individual states have failed. Despite a disturbing watering down of the climate protection targets, we welcome the outcome of the negotiations, because it makes the enforcement of the Kyoto Protocol possible", stressed the Chairman of the WBGU and Director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hartmut Graßl. "A failure of this conference would have thrown back climate protection politics by years and would have made the avoidance of dangerous climate change much more difficult. Now it is important to focus public attention on the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol which starts after 2012 and to make sure that by the latest then a significant reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is reached", Graßl continued. The high-level segment of the Sixth Conference of the Parties to the Climate Convention which failed in The Hague and reconvened in Bonn concluded today with an agreement about the arrangement of the Kyoto Protocol. The negotiating parties agreed on a compromise paper, which demanded numerous concessions especially by the EU. Russia, Canada and Japan were allowed a substantial credit for carbon dioxide sinks, namely forests and fields which store the greenhouse gas. This waters down the reduction target of 5,2% for industrialised countries which the Kyoto Protocol originally aspired to. At least it was possible to stabilise the emissions of greenhouse gases by industrialised countries on the 1990 level. The agreement almost failed, because a few nations refused to accept the proposed mechanism for compliance control. At the last moment, the parties agreed to postpone a decision about the legal character of the compliance control after the enforcement of the Kyoto Protocol. Please direct your queries to: WBGU Secretariat Reichpietschufer 60-62, 8th Floor D-10785 Berlin Germany Tel. +49 30 263948 12 Fax +49 30 263948 50 Email: wbgu@wbgu.de All press releases and reports can be downloaded at http://www.wbgu.de.

---

Copyright © WBGU www.wbgu.de Webmaster