UK Climate Change Programme 2006 - JNCC - Defra

CHAPTER CHAPTER TWO
International Title framework for action
15
The UK Government will:
• build on the progress made at the G8
Summit in Gleneagles and the Montréal
Climate Change Conference to strengthen
the international regime to tackle climate
change;
• in partnership with the EU enhance our
efforts to help India, China and other
developing countries evolve as low-carbon
economies;
• work to build international consensus on
the scale of global action needed to
stabilise the climate and avoid dangerous
climate change;
• work with EU partners to secure agreement
to further action in the EU, in particular
strenghtening the Emissions Trading
Scheme beyond 2012 and making it the
heart of a global carbon market; and
• support international collaboration and
coordination to ensure the successful
expansion of new technologies, through
action in key areas such as product
standards and research development.
1. Climate change is a global problem, with global
causes and effects. Preventing dangerous manmade
climate change and dealing with the impacts
that cannot now be avoided requires efforts by all
countries, consistent with their responsibility for
greenhouse gas emissions, their capacity to take
action, and the effects they will experience. In
2003, the UK contributed about 2 per cent of
world greenhouse gas emissions. Our contribution
will fall as we move towards a low-carbon
economy, and as the increasing demand for energy
in developing countries continues to be met. By
2020 our net contribution to world emissions from
fossil fuels will be 1.5 per cent or lower. For that
reason the Government considers it essential that
the UK and our EU partners give high priority to
reaching and implementing international
agreements to tackle climate change.
The UNFCCC
2. In recognition of the global nature of the
problem, the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was
agreed at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro
in 1992. To date 189 countries, including all
major developed and developing countries, have
ratified the Convention. The UNFCCC sets the
overarching objective for multilateral action: to
stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the
atmosphere at a level that avoids dangerous
anthropogenic climate change. It also establishes
key principles to guide the international response,
in particular that countries should act consistently
with their responsibility for climate change as well
as their capacity to do so, and that developed
countries should take the lead, given their
historical contribution to greenhouse gas
emissions and the economic development they
have enjoyed as a result. The Convention places a
commitment to act on all countries but whereas
for developing countries this is unquantified and
linked to assistance from developed countries, the
developed countries agreed specifically to aim to
return greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels
by 2000. The UK was one of relatively few
countries that achieved this, with emissions in
2000 about 13.6 per cent below the1990 level 8 .
The Kyoto Protocol
3. The Parties quickly acknowledged that the
Convention commitments could form only a first
step in the international community’s response to
climate change. The Kyoto Protocol, agreed in
December 1997, sought to address this.
Developed countries agreed to reduce their
overall emissions of a basket of six greenhouse
gases by 5.2 per cent below 1990 levels over the
period 2008-2012, with differentiated, legally
binding targets. The then 15 EU Member States
adopted a collective target to reduce EU
emissions by 8 per cent. Under this ‘bubble’
arrangement the EU’s target is distributed
between Member States to reflect their national
circumstances, requirements for economic
8 13.6 per cent is the fall in all emissions minus all removals between 1990 and 2000. Emissions of Kyoto basket fell by an estimated 13.8 per cent between the
base year and 2000.