Kyoto Protocol winds down as delegates head to Doha_美文

Kyoto Protocol winds down as delegates head to Doha

“The principles embedded in the Kyoto Protocol are absolutely essential to a workable international treaty. Those principles are around things like common counting rules and transparency so that one country can see what another country is doing when it makes a commitment,” Davis said.

Protestors voiced their anger at the last climate summit in Durban in 2011, after delegates failed to reach a new post-Kyoto deal, pledging only to adopt a legal agreement by 2015.

The sheer size of the meetings has made reaching a consensus virtually impossible, says Heike Schroeder of the University of East Anglia.

“Very small countries would come with, let’s say, three delegates: Somalia sent three delegates to Copenhagen, whilst Brazil sent almost 600 delegates. That’s a huge difference. And so these small countries just cannot actually be part of all the negotiations that are taking place,” Schroeder said.

Schroeder is pessimistic that much will be achieved this time round.

“Nothing has changed. And it will be the continuation of what we’ve seen in terms of a lot of talk with very little progress,” Schroeder said.

Dieter Helm of Oxford University paints a similarly bleak picture.

“By 2020 on current growth rates, China and India will be twice their current size, there will be 400 to 600 gigawatts of new coal on the system and we’ll be way beyond 400 parts per million (in terms of global emissions),” Helm said.