Word: protocol
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That being said, the Poznan summit is only a waypoint on the road to negotiating a new Kyoto Protocol; it's not the final event. Kyoto, which mandated greenhouse-gas reductions for developed nations (except the U.S., which never ratified the treaty), will expire in 2012. And last year, at the contentious Bali summit, delegates managed to paper over disputes - including those among the U.S., which under the Bush Administration has generally played the spoiler at these talks; the European Union, which has routinely argued for the most stringent carbon reductions; and the big developing nations, like India and China...
...Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements released 28 new reports last Sunday that will “offer a blueprint and information” to countries debating a successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that has been widely panned as ineffective...
...says Duncan Marsh, TNC's director of international climate policy. "We have no choice." That's the promise of avoided deforestation, in which rich countries pay to keep rain forests standing and receive carbon credits in return. Currently, the international carbon cap-and-trade system organized by the Kyoto Protocol only recognizes industrial projects - such as a rich country paying to improve energy efficiency at a power plant - or programs to actively reforest land already cleared. It doesn't recognize avoided deforestation - also known by the acronym REDD, for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation. With timber and biofuel plantations...
...Forest of Problems Avoided deforestation seems like a no-brainer - so why wasn't it included in the Kyoto Protocol? Ironically, it was omitted in part due to the work of a number of prominent environmental groups, including Greenpeace. They feared that avoided deforestation schemes could flood the trading market with countless cheap carbon credits; after all, there are an estimated 638 billion tons of carbon locked in the world's forests. If even a fraction of those credits are put on the market, it could let developed countries off the hook when it comes to making the hard changes...
...terms of its merits,” said Kennedy School Professor Robert N. Stavins, the co-director of the policy group. “We feel that we should provide information to the countries of the world to help them in their quest to design a post-Kyoto Protocol policy...