Carmen Bunzl - Universidad Pontificia Comillas

Chapter 1. Introduction 7
In 1995, the IPCC announced its conclusion to the world: while
acknowledging many uncertainties, the experts found, first, that the world was
certainly getting warmer; and second, that this was probably not entirely
natural, “the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human
influence on global climate”.
The next major meeting, the 1997 UN Conference on Climate Change, was
held in Kyoto, Japan. The greenhouse debate became tangled up with problems
involving fairness and the power relations between industrialized and
developing countries. United States proposed to gradually reduce emissions to
the 1990 levels; Western Europe countries demanded more aggressive action;
coal-rich China and most other developing countries, however, demanded
exemption from the regulations until their economies caught up with the
nations that had already industrialized. As a further impediment, the countries
with the most to lose from global warming – the poor – had the least power to
negotiate an agreement. A dramatic intervention by the U.S. Vice President Al
Gore, who flew to Kyoto on the last day, pushed through a compromise – the
Kyoto Protocol. The agreement exempted poor countries for the time being, and
engaged wealthy countries to cut their emissions significantly by 2012. This was
only an initial experiment, presumably followed by a better agreement.
Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería ICAI Carmen Bunzl Boulet Junio 2008