EuropaWorld 27/7/2001 After Bonn the World Has Grown Up

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was an attempt to galvanise the nations of the world into doing something about the menace of climate change. For four long years the parties have argued about how to put into effect the Protocol's admittedly arbitrary targets for reductions in the greenhouse gases, held generally to be responsible for global warming. Meanwhile, environmentalists, backed by an increasing scientific consensus, have predicted disaster on shorter or longer time scales if these targets - and more - were not achieved, while the country that generates a third of the world's emissions pulled out of the talks entirely, calling the Kyoto treaty 'fatally flawed.'

And yet now, after the resumed climate talks in Bonn, an agreement has been reached. To paraphrase Doctor Samuel Johnson commenting upon a dog walking upon its hind legs - 'the wonder of the matter is not whether it does it well, but that it does it at all.' So with Bonn. The wonder is that an agreement has been reached.

That the agreement, as it stands, will have little or no impact on the climate is true - but that does not necessarily make it worthless, still less as various commentators have accused it of being 'mere gesture politics.' The true significance of the Bonn agreement is that the majority of the nations of the world have generally concluded that they should work together in pursuit of common objectives.

Two things make this particular agreement unique. First, the collective response that nations have signed up to is on a scale greater and more pervasive than any previous international agreement. Indeed it is the potential cost implications that have deterred the world's richest nation. This is the case even given the dilution of the Bonn agreement compared to the original objectives of Kyoto, themselves diluted from what the environmentalists had called for.

Secondly, this would seem to be the first major international agreement reached without the participation of the United States which is now left sitting on the sidelines in splendid isolation.

From a European perspective this isolation of the US is certainly not a matter for rejoicing. Even more so when American attitudes seem stuck midway between bewilderment and condescension. "We have not sought to prevent other nations from moving ahead so long as legitimate US interests were protected," the US Under-Secretary of State for Global Affairs, Paula Dobriansky is reported to have said in commenting on the Bonn agreement.

Yet the truth is that America is becoming de-coupled from the rest of the world on a range of issues that include missile defence, genetically modified agriculture, gun control, use of the death penalty, besides the all-important climate change issue. It was not for nothing that the US was booted off the UN Human Rights Commission a couple of months back. Europe and the rest of the world has moved and is moving one-way, the US is moving another. In the global rowing boat this matters.

The US is also now in the dock at the World Trade Organisation which has just determined that unreformed US tax laws grant what are, in effect, export subsidies worth billions of dollars to US companies.

The saddest thing about the Bonn agreement is that possibly the United States might have come on board if the compromises that were available in Bonn had been available in previous rounds of negotiation - principally in the Hague last November. But it is useless to ask such 'what if' questions. Now the task is to move forward.

The way is clearly open to the United States to change course and to come on board the climate change train. There are massive markets for clean technologies in the developing world as those countries now begin to industrialise. And as part of the Bonn agreement negotiators set up a fund to help them do so. Whatever their politicians may say, US business is too acute to miss out on this opportunity.

One indirect consequence of the Bonn agreement is that there is now general acceptance that planting or re-planting forests can count towards carbon emission reduction targets.
It was the European Union's firm objection, led by the feisty Environment Commissioner, Margot Wallström, to this dilution of the Kyoto principles that was largely responsible for the breakdown of the earlier Hague talks.

Environmentalists say that the world has lost four-fifths of its ancient cover, much of it during the period that has seen the increase in global temperatures. Forests are useful not so much for locking up carbon in their leaves and branches as for maintaining a deep carbon rich loam beneath their roots. Cut down the trees and much of this is washed away allowing fast decay that releases vast quantities of carbon into the atmosphere, according to scientists. Forests also release large amounts of water vapour into the atmosphere. The effects of this are imperfectly understood - but to the extent they help to form clouds - they assist in combatting global warming by providing a surface to reflect the sun's rays away from the earth.

So despite its loopholes and derogations, the Bonn agreement puts the world back on the track of working together to solve the climate problem. The measures agreed may be small, and by themselves, insignificant - but the opportunity is there to move on, widening and deepening the agreement. At Bonn a process was started and, for once, the best was not allowed to become the enemy of the good.