What Kyoto Protocol Provides

The Kyoto Protocol is an international treaty first proposed in 1992 and was introduced under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It is responsible for committing developed countries to use more green forward technology or contributing to battle climate change. The protocol was adopted in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan and implemented in 2005. The protocol was initially signed by 195 countries and was the first significantly impacting protocol taken to reduce climate change. 

The treaty was created upon analysing scientific data on global warming and acknowledging that global warming was created by human carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases, hence framing a policy to curb and minimise the pollution in a fair method that primarily focused on developed and developing countries taking action in sync and sustainably together. The main criteria are to ‘reduce greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere. These gases mainly included perfluorocarbons, CO2, methane, sulphur hexafluoride, nitrous oxides/fluorides, HFCS and PFCs.

The policy made sure that the responsibilities were shared not only on the basis of pollution production but also in countries that have economic development due to products causing pollution. Hence, not any one group of countries would be at a disadvantage.

The 3 Mechanisms

The Kyoto protocol produced three solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions based on the needs of the countries.

International Emission Trading

Here mainly, the countries with unused shares of emissions or spare emissions are sold to countries with excess emissions, thus forming another commodity of sorts to reduce the emissions. It’s also called the carbon market. (article 17-Kyoto protocol)

Clean Development Mechanism

In this mechanism, there was a choice for countries to implement emission-reducing or limiting projects (mainly in developing countries). The project can be used as a commodity, where they get reduction credits worth about 1 ton of CO2 envision shares. (Article 13)

Joint Implementation

In this solution, a country with binding reduction/limitation of carbon emissions to implement a project in return for 1 ton co2 reduction in the final count in the Kyoto protocol (Article-6).

1st Commitment

The first commitment period was between 2008 and 2012. In this period, 36 countries were able to keep their carbon emissions within the given limit and successfully implement the protocol. Nine countries have higher carbon emissions than the set limit. Hence they had to make certain changes. Let us understand this in simple words.

All countries are allowed a certain limit on carbon emissions, and if they were to cross this carbon emission limit, then the country doing so must accommodate the emission by buying a carbon emission share from a country that has low carbon emission. In other words, the countries with excess production buy shares from countries with lower production.

Result Of 1st Commitment

Despite significant reduction visible in the region of the previously USSR territories (due to the dissolution of the USSR, the countries were able to reduce their emission significantly.), the overall global emission still rose by 33% between the years 1992 and 2010.

The United States of America, which had been a significant target in the first Commitment, were not able to abide by the protocol, and Canada also withdrew from the protocol. Hence the second commitment period began.

2nd Commitment

The second Commitment was agreed upon from 2012 to an extended date of 2020. This amendment was also called the Doha amendment to the Kyoto protocol. The second round targets included countries from the southern hemisphere, the European Union, nordic countries like Norway, Iceland, some Middle East, and surrounding countries like Ukraine, Kazakhstan, etc.

Many of these target countries refused to follow the protocol. Japan, Russia and New Zealand did not set any targets in the second protocol, unlike the first time. By 2020 147 countries had accepted the Doha amendment. It entered into force in December 2020, where 37 parties with binding commitments and 34 have backed out.

Result of 2nd Commitment

The second Commitment led to a yearly revision by the UNFCCC, where measures were taken, leading to the adoption of the 2015 Paris agreement. This agreement does not fall under the Kyoto protocol.

They were able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 18% in the second protocol, but the parties were different from the first protocol.

The second protocol still has many controversies yet to be resolved due to politics, funding and lack of punishments for non-abiding countries. The Paris protocol is set to replace the Kyoto protocol due to lack of participation, but it’s not a fixed decision.

Conclusion

The Kyoto protocol, even though it was a very significant start towards the improvement of the climate change crisis, the protocol in itself was riddled with loopholes which resulted in many malpractices amongst the participating countries.

The protocol drew inspiration from the US sulphur acid rain issue, where a similar approach was applied between the leading countries, Britain, Europe and U.S., where they were only allowed a limited amount of perfluorocarbons and sulphur hexafluoride pollution in the atmosphere resulting in a drastic reduction in acid rain in the country.

But the Kyoto protocol was built by capitalist countries and run by them. Let’s take a small example of one of the exploits that occurred. A company from South Korea was able to eliminate a sulphur hexafluoride pollutant and eradicate it in great measure from the atmosphere.

This resulted in major EU countries buying the technology from the country to reduce the emission, but this also resulted in a by-product of smaller greenhouse gas which further increased the emission in the atmosphere; hence the country was not only selling the technology to the EU market, but they were also making money off selling their share of carbon emission to these countries hence doubling the profit.

Not only this, but many countries that had a significant impact on the emissions being produced, such as the United States of America, were the countries that ratified the protocol. This resulted in a negative impact as they were unable to fulfil the purpose of the protocol and had to bore increased unnecessary costs. 

Note: India was a developing country not bound by the Kyoto protocol. Hence it was exempted from the treaty. The government also ratified (2002) before implementation in 2008. This is because emission rates vary greatly between developed and developing countries, with the former being a significantly larger producer of the emission. India still plays a significant role in curbing the emission by producing more renewable energy forms and helping 1st world countries reduce their emissions.