The Kyoto Protocol will cut the developing world’s greenhouse-gas emissions — implicated in runaway global warming — by at least one billion tonnes by the end of 2012, according to the United Nations.
The organisation announced that projects planned under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which encourages companies in the so-called Third World to invest in reducing emissions, have reached the one-billion milestone.
The expected emissions reductions are equivalent to eliminating the combined annual emissions of Spain and the United Kingdom.
The programme has recorded more than 800 projects that are already under way or planned. They include wind farms, power plants that burn sugar-cane waste, and efforts to capture gases emitted from landfill sites.
Nearly 300 projects of these have registered or are in the process of registering with the CDM scheme, and the UN expects the remainder to register as well.
Although Africa is lagging behind, the continent has seen a five-fold increase in CDM projects over the past year. Most of the existing projects are in Brazil and India.
”It is up to the political decision-makers to ensure that investment takes place in their countries. These are first and foremost economic decisions,” a spokesperson for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change told the Science and Development Network’s website, SciDev.Net, which has an entire dossier devoted to climate change.
Janos Pasztor, who coordinates the CDM at the climate-change secretariat, said governments are expected to address the uneven geographical distribution of projects at the UN climate-change summit in November.
The European Union announced that in 2005 it had emitted about 60-million tonnes of greenhouse gases — or 3,3% — less than projected.
Although this may seem positive, it is potentially bad news for the Kyoto Protocol’s CDM, which has helped to fund hundreds of ”green” projects in the South.
Under the protocol, Europe must reduce emissions to 8% less than 1990 levels by 2012. One of the mechanisms for helping nations achieve this goal is the European emissions market, which allows countries that produce fewer emissions to sell their spare allowances to other countries.
The EU announcement earlier this year left the market highly volatile. The fluctuating price of emitting a tonne of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere above Europe may seem a distant concern for climate-change policymakers in developing countries.
But the CDM gives industrialised nations the option of offsetting their emissions at home by investing in projects that reduce emissions abroad. If the price of investing abroad is cheaper than buying emissions on the EU market, CDM projects become attractive options.
Their number rose rapidly last year. According to the World Bank, more than 400-million tonnes of emissions reductions were agreed through the CDM in 2005 and in the first quarter of 2006.
European investors paid for more than half of this volume, with projects in China accounting for more than two-thirds of it. Analysts at Point Carbon estimate that globally, in 2005, nearly €2-billion flowed to developing countries.
Another issue could be of even greater concern. EU governments are currently discussing whether to limit the proportion of emissions their industries can offset through the CDM.
Such a trend could pose a serious threat to future ”green” investment in the South. Ultimately, however, the fall in the price of carbon in Europe could be good news for international climate-change negotiations.
Benito Müller, senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, United Kingdom, believes that the flurry of activity since 2005 has been based on inflated prices and false impressions that there was a lot of money to be made out of European investors.
Realism, he says, should lead to a sounder environment for projects.
Moreover, if the price of polluting had remained high, it might have made climate negotiations for the period following the end of the Kyoto Protocol more difficult.
”There is no objective to keep the cost of mitigating climate change high,” says Halldor Thorgeirsson, deputy executive secretary to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Quite the contrary. The convention hopes the European trading scheme will demonstrate that a cleaner atmosphere is not that costly. ”It is clear that policymakers will be looking to the market for indicators of the cost of polluting,” he says.
Thorgeirsson says the EU trading scheme is important as it ”demonstrates that access to the atmosphere has a value”.
”You could say that so far, some decisions have been based on an incomplete economic analysis because they have not factored in the cost of releasing gases into the atmosphere,” he says. ”That cost has not been carried by the emitter, but has been shared by the rest of humanity.” — SciDev.Net
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