Climate change agreement: from Kyoto to Doha and beyond | WPN World People News

December's climate change conference in Paris aims to come up with an international agreement to help limit global warming after 2020, but it is far from the first one. MEPs are this week voting on a recommendation to ensure that the Doha climate agreement, setting targets for emissions reductions up to 2020, is still ratified by the end of the year. Read on to find out more about the first climate change agreements and the efforts to come up with a new global deal to help fight global warming.

Kyoto Protocol

The 1992 United Nations' Framework Convention on Climate Change sought to slow down the increase in global temperatures, but by 1995 it was clear that it was inadequate. As a result the world's nations launched negotiations to strengthen the global response to climate change and in 1997 adopted the Kyoto Protocol, which initially only contained binding targets for emissions reductions until 2012.

Doha amendment

After the Copenhagen climate summit of 2009 failed to come up with a new deal everyone could agree with, the Doha amendment to the Kyoto protocol was adopted in 2012. This introduced a "second commitment" period from 2013 to 2020 with new emission commitments that were at least equally ambitious as those under the first period. It legally binds developed countries to emission reduction targets of at least 18% below 1990 levels by 2020.

Italian EPP member Elisabetta Gardini wrote the recommendation on the Doha agreement MEPs are voting on this week, which calls on member states to ratify the text as soon as possible. She said that the Doha deal is mainly supported by EU countries and that member states are already implementing a 20% emissions reduction by 2020.

Source: European Parliament