Bearing the brunt of climate change

By Anna McLauchlin

Date: 26/05/05

In a year when the EU's emissions trading programme began, ministers started discussing the successor to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and the UK announced that tackling global warming would be the priority for its EU presidency, it was almost inevitable that EU Green Week 2005 (31 May-3 June) would focus on climate change.

Climate change has been top of the environment policy menu for a while now and with good reason. The earth has warmed up by 0.6°C over the past 100 years, and some experts estimate that by the end of this century it could rise by nearly 6°C more.

Roasting our Earth is going to cost us and not just in lost flora and fauna. On Monday (23 May), the UN announced that climate change was the third largest cause of world hunger after armed conflict and HIV/AIDS.

Politicians are persuaded of the threat, but are hampered by national divisions over how to tackle it. The Kyoto Protocol parties agree that post-2012 action without the US, Australia and emerging market countries is problematic. But the US is determined to push ahead with technology solutions, while fast developing nations such as China and India are not prepared to stifle their economies to solve a problem that to date has been caused by the industrialised West.

Ministers will meet later this year in Montreal, Canada, to work towards a consensus on slashing greenhouse gases after 2012 when Kyoto ends, but have already warned that there is a long road ahead.

Within the EU there is more convergence of opinion, but attempts to broaden emission-cutting strategies could be met with hostility from struggling sectors.

The Commission has long said that it wants to bring aviation emissions into its strategies, as well as maritime transport and forestry policy. Airlines are pushing to join the EU emissions trading scheme, which environmentalists argue is simply to avoid harsher measures. But having only just recovered from the post-9/11 slowdown, the sector is opposed to more costs.

Outside the Brussels bubble of EU policymaking, various cities across Europe are working on local schemes to cut emissions, such as encouraging more cyclists or imposing congestion charges.

This approach is now being mirrored across the Atlantic. More than 140 mayors have joined an initiative, launched by the mayor of Seattle in February, to take measures to try to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 7% compared to 1990 levels by 2012, which is the goal Bush would have signed up to had the US not pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol.

They are hoping that the Bush administration will find that its climate change policy is increasingly isolated in its own country. If so, this could have even more positive consequences for Montreal.

Article takes a look at current developments on measures to tackle climate change after 2012, to follow the Kyoto Protocol.