Dresden - Kyoto - Johannesburg: Climate Protection in Distress
ResearchThe recent floods cause many citizens to fear the consequences of global climate change. Environment and climate protection could therefore become an important election issue.
The ruling coalition points out that the CDU's competence team lacks an environmental expert, it emphasises Germany's leading role in climate protection and calls for stronger international efforts to decrease anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. On the occasion of the Earth Summit 2002 in Johannesburg, people are pushing to finalise the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, which is the first international agreement obliging countries to reduce carbon emissions. A current study carried out by the Mannheim Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), however, suggests that the Kyoto Protocol can hardly be expected to reduce global carbon emissions. Celebrations in Johannesburg would therefore be somewhat premature.
By signing the Kyoto Protocol in the year 1997, the industrialised nations obliged themselves to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions between 2008 to 2012 by five per cent from levels measured in 1998. At the Climate Change Conference in Den Haag 2002, implementation of the protocol seemed to fail due to arguments over the specific rules for international trade with emission certificates and offsetting of carbon sinks. Farmland and forests are regarded as potential carbon sinks, since they can store greenhouse gas and various industrialised nations use them as an important indirect medium to reach their goals of climate control. Furthermore, the USA cancelled their Kyoto participation in March 2001 due to the feared economic costs.
The remaining industrialised nations agreed on retaining the Kyoto Protocol during the climate negotiations in Bonn and Marrakesh at the end of 2001. This agreement now includes the unlimited emissions trading and the extensive offsetting of carbon sinks. Nevertheless, both directives significantly weaken the ecological effectiveness of the Kyoto Protocol. In particular, the free trade of excess emission permits, so-called "hot air", considerably diminishes actual greenhouse gas reduction. "Hot air" mainly stems from Russia and Ukraine, to which the Kyoto Protocol granted significantly more emission permits for the years 2008 to 2012 then their economy actually needs. According to ZEW calculations, if the original Kyoto obligations were met and the USA joined, global emissions would effectively decrease by seven per cent compared to the year 2010. If countries make use of potential sinks, however, this reduction falls to less than five percent. Without the USA, the world's current leader in emissions, and with rising demand for freely tradable emission permits, we see a zero net-positive reduction. The Eastern European oversupply of "hot air" is sufficient to completely cover the remaining industrialised nations' reduction needs. Even where we assume account that countries with "hot air" strategically limit their emission permit supply to drive up the prices, emissions decrease by only one per cent compared to 2010. Compared to 1990, this actually equates to an increase of global emissions by one third.
From an economic perspective, this gloomy outlook on climate protection is hardly surprising. Since climate protection is a global problem, all nations are incentivised to behave as free-riders rather than making an effort themselves. In regard of the current devastating floods and other impending climate catastrophes in the future, the urgency of the question of how to achieve cooperation for substantial climate protection becomes quite clear.
Contact
Prof. Dr. Christoph Böhringer, Phone: 0041/621/1235-210, E-Mail: boehringer@zew.de
Prof. Dr. Andreas Löschel, Phone: 0041/621/1235-200, E-Mail: loeschel@zew.de
Prof. Dr. Carsten Vogt, Email: vogt@zew.de