Carbon Credits: The Kyoto Protocol Solution

As you may recall, last post we established that black carbon had very harmful effects to climate and human health. One solution to reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions in particular Carbon Dioxide, is Carbon credits. The basic idea of carbon trading is that one economic party A, engages in an transaction of trading carbon credits with another party B, such that, A pays B to pollute less so that A can pollute more! Carbon credits were a result of the Kyoto Protocol, and were designed to reduce global carbon footprint. Below is Table 1 provided by the UNFCCC illustrating various countries’ reduction targets.

Table 1

More specifically, this report by the UNFCCC shows exact assigned carbon credits for various countries under the Kyoto Protocol:

Table 2

As you can see from the above table, many countries agreed to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which was a huge success. Further successes from the Kyoto Protocol can be seen in the graph below from and the 2011 figures for carbon emissions from the Union of Concerned Scientists:

Table 3

As you can see, many countries have actually reduced their carbon emission under the Kyoto Protocol targets. The nations that took on targets under the treaty agreed to reduce emissions by an average of 5%. On the 13^th February 2013, the UNFCCC announced that they had exceeded this goal and reduced emissions by more than 20%! Unfortunately, from Table 2, you may have also noticed that neither China nor the US had assigned carbon credits under the Kyoto Protocol. This was due to the fact that they did not agree to it. Considering China was the World's highest carbon emitter, this didn't inspire much confidence in many other nations hopes for reducing carbon emission. In fact, in 2011, Russia, Japan and Canada asserted they would not comply with a second round of carbon cuts in a new Kyoto agreement, due to China having no targeted emission cuts and therefore effectively, no accountability (Watts, 2011)

NASA’s latest record however, pits carbon dioxide levels at 402.23 ppm as of November 2015, shown in the graph below.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have continued to rise, even though more and more countries are making an effort to reduce emissions. This is mostly due to emerging economies such as China, and Russia, which did not agree to sign the Kyoto Protocol. The INDC database assert that these economies in particular emit the biggest proportion of GHGs globally, as seen below:

• China – 23.75%
• India – 5.73%
• Brazil – 5.70%
• Russia – 5.35%
• Japan – 2.82% (not an emerging economy but did not sign the Kyoto Protocol)

It is clear that we need a more global, unanimous effort, in which everyone agrees to tackle climate change, especially the biggest contributors. Perhaps in the upcoming COP21 negotiations we will see this result!