ENVIRONMENT-CLIMATE: Germany Leads Europe’s ‘Pusher’ Role

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ramesh Jaura

BONN, Oct 26 1999 (IPS) - Germany – which has had a major impact on the European Union’s environmental leadership role in the past seven years – is determined to play the “pusher” at the global climate change talks which began here Monday, analysts say.

This, according to a Group-of-77 (developing countries) delegate who did not wish to be identified, was underlined by German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder Monday.

Schroeder exhorted in his opening address to some 5,000 participants from more than 150 countries, environmental non-governmental organisations (NGO) and the international business community, to work towards enabling the crucial Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change enter into force by 2002.

The year 2002 will mark the tenth anniversary of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro, also known as the Earth Summit.

The 1997 Protocol, agreed after tough discussions in the Japanese city, is an addition to the 1992 Climate Change convention – adopted in Rio de Janeiro – that limits the greenhouse gas emissions of 39 industrialised countries.

Once it comes into force and becomes legally binding, the protocol would commit developed countries – known as Annex -One countries – to individual emissions targets for the period 2008-2012. The overall result would be a decline of over 5 percent in developed country emissions compared to 1990 levels.

By arresting and reversing the upward trend in greenhouse gas emissions that started in these countries 150 years ago, the protocol promises to move the international community one step closer to achieving the objective of the climate change convention.

For the Kyoto Protocol to enter into force, 55 ratifications are required, including ratifications from industrialised countries responsible for 55 percent of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions those nations had produced in 1990.

In real terms, if the United States and the Russian Federation do not ratify, the Protocol will not enter into force, Michael Zammit Cutajar, executive secretary of the Climate Change treaty told IPS.

There were other formulas for fulfilling that 55 percent, but those two countries together account for more than 45 percent of the 1990 CO2 emissions. In any case, said Zammit Cutajar, the U.S. is such an important global player that it must be on board.

According to the Climate Change secretariat based in the city of Bonn – which is developing into a Centre for International Cooperation – 84 countries have signed the protocol, but all of the 14 countries that have ratified it to date are small developing countries.

Large developing economies such as those of China, India, Indonesia and Brazil have not ratified.

Since these countries are likely to emit significant quantities of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, the US Senate insists that they be obliged to undertake further reduction commitments – a conditionality, however, that is not envisaged by the Convention.

In the Kyoto Protocol, the developed countries commit themselves to reducing their collective emissions of six key greenhouse gases by at least 5 percent. This group target will be achieved through cuts of 8 percent by Switzerland, most Central and East European states, and the 15 European Union countries.

The EU will meet its target by distributing different rates among its member states.

The protocol also commits the United States to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 7 percent and Canada by 6 percent. Hungary, Japan, and Poland. Russia, New Zealand, and Ukraine are to stabilise their emissions, while Norway may increase emissions by up to 1 percent, Australia by up to 8 percent, and Iceland 10 percent.

The German chancellor’s call to have the Kyoto Protocol ratified by 2002 was “a step forward”, said Bill Hare of Greenpeace International. He regretted however that there was “little evidence” of the German government’s commitment to meet its legal obligations to cut emissions by 21 percent by the year 2010.

Greenpeace presented last week a study by the German climate research organisation, Wuppertal Institute, which said that Germany would not reach the reduction goal if current traffic growth continued.

Another dpcument circulating at what is officially known as the Fifth Session of the Conference of Parties (COP 5) to the Climate Change treaty, seeks to put the German and EU role in perspective.

“The United States and Japan have from the beginning, in the late 1980s, taken a defensive position in the climate negotiations,” says the report – “The European Community and Climate Protection: What’s Behind the Empty Rhetoric?” – published by the Norwegian Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research – Oslo (CICERO)

“Consequently, a political vacuum as well as a need for leadership has existed at the global level,” it adds.

U.S. scientists have played a dominant role within acknowledged scientific and expert groups, but it has been primarily the EU, rather that the U.S. or other major powers, who has pressed for the establishment of stringent and binding international climate targets, the study claims.

The CICERO report notes that the EU on its side has been quite willing to function as “a leader or, more accurately, a pusher” at the global level. The key ingredients of EU environmental leadership strategy have been a comparatively ambitious climate target and mobilisation of international public opinion.

As early as 1988, the European Council, in the first mention of climate change by the EU, underlined the importance of the community performing a leading role in the protection of the global climate change and depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer.

Since then, ministers of member countries, commissioners and the parliament have repeatedly stressed the importance and urgency of EU leadership, the report adds. When it came to target-setting in March 1997, however, the asymmetries and dissimilarities among the member countries had a significant influence.

“Most conspicuously, Germany alone delivered more that 80 percent of the total reductions. Britain contributed around 20 percent whereas Spain made the largest negative contribution of around 12 percent,” says the report.

“Germany made it possible to set quite ambitious reduction target even though seven member countries either would stabilise or even increase their CO2 emissions until the year 2010,” the paper adds.