PRESS CONFERENCE ON UNITED NATIONS CLIMATE CONTROL FRAMEWORK

Press Briefing

PRESS CONFERENCE ON UNITED NATIONS CLIMATE CONTROL FRAMEWORK

A new draft protocol had emerged from the two-week final negotiating session which ended in Bonn last Friday, Michael Zammit Cutajar, the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Control, said at a Headquarters press conference this morning. Working with that draft, he said, the Third Conference of Parties to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change in Kyoto, Japan, to be held from 1 to 10 December, should be able to finalize a protocol setting legally binding target dates for industrial climate factors such as emissions of greenhouse gases.

While the draft did not specifically set out targets, it was a clearer statement than had existed before on positions, requirements and options, Mr. Cutajar continued. With the emergence of the draft, the preparatory phase of setting legally binding limits was finished. Agreeing on the specific targets was the major issue for the Kyoto Conference, and it came down to a matter of global diplomacy.

For example, the United States could call for returning to 1990 levels of emissions by a legally binding means before a certain target year, but that level of emissions had perhaps never even been reached by another country such as Germany. Should all countries be held to certain standards or should the standards be different based on practice and history? Such were the issues to be negotiated by ministers during the Kyoto Conference. Other technical points would be taken into consideration, such as which gas levels were to be cut, which gases were actually involved and which new gases were emerging as factors in climate change.

Those, he said, were the "what?" issues -- what needs to be done? what criteria are to be met? Those would be decided at the Conference, and after that would come the "how" questions -- how will we achieve the determined levels? That would take time, he said.

A key question to be answered by agreement on the binding protocol at the Conference was whether the developed countries would exercise leadership in the area of the human factor in climate change. It would be a strong signal to developing countries, whose per capita emissions levels were vastly different from that of developed countries and who could not be held to the same standards. But when the developing countries would "come on board" was another critical issue to consider.

A provision was being written into the protocol for countries to sign on voluntarily, and there were provisions for periodic review, he said. There was already strong developed world participation in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Setting legally binding limits on

factors affecting climate change would indicate political will and would influence the psychology of the markets, which would have to put climate concern ahead of its present, purely profit, orientation. The protocol would not be ratified for a long time, but it would be the start of a process whose impact would show up much later. The Conference was three weeks away, he noted, and journalists would be major participants. Between now and then, there was much work to be done. The draft had not been expected to be formulated and yet it had emerged. Next week there was a conference of ministers in Tokyo as a prelude to the Kyoto Conference. On the day before the Conference itself, there would be a high- level meeting to determine what exactly would go on the table. Ultimately, the issue had reached such a high level of participation that even higher level phone calls were expected throughout the Conference. The original Convention just five years before had itself been forged by the United Kingdom, on behalf of the European Union, and the United States. When asked if there were bilateral meetings being held between the European Union and the United States, Mr. Cutajar said he had heard of bilateral meetings. Asked about an expensive advertisement claiming that legally binding limits on greenhouse gases were not global and would not work, Mr. Cutajar said the protocol was indeed global and it could work. Developing countries were not signing on yet, but they had to be shown that it made economic sense for them to develop in line with the protocol. Effectiveness had to be seen from the perspective of needing to reverse 200 years of history in substance emissions. If the step was strong enough, it would make a difference at a point beyond our lifetime. But if no step was taken, the problem would continue getting worse. Now was the opportunity for leadership and business. In response to a question on how many countries were expected to agree at Kyoto, he said it was not a question of how many countries would agree, but, rather, what kind of a deal was made. There were two ways of looking at the issue: stabilizing the emissions level was a big step in terms of climate change. After that came other questions, such as how much for whom? Maybe countries would take on different targets. An important development, however, was that the door would be open for developing countries to come in at their own levels. To a correspondent who said it seemed likely that the United States Congress would not agree to the protocol if developing countries did not sign, Mr. Cutajar said that was the fine point of diplomacy. The United States Congress had already given its view that certain criteria had to be met. The President had come out in support of the protocol. Now, all that remained was to negotiate, to make an agreement satisfactory to everyone. Asked what would happen to countries not fulfilling the Convention targets for the year 2000, Mr. Cutajar said the Convention had set out aims, not targets. Whether States met those aims would not be known until the year 2000, and the protocol that applied to the following period was binding. Most States probably would not make the Convention aims. In fact, only the United Kingdom and Germany were on target.

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