The Kyoto Protocol was negotiated almost 18 years ago in December 1997 in the city of Kyoto, Japan and came into force in February 2005.
The Kyoto Protocol is a legally binding agreement under which industrialized countries are to reduce their collective emissions of greenhouse gases by 5.2% compared to the year 1990. The goal was to lower overall emissions for the greenhouse gases - carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and sulfur hexafluoride.
Kyoto’s national targets ranged from 8% reductions for the European Union to 7% for the US, 6% for Japan, 0% for Russia, and permitted actual increases of 8% for Australia and 10% for Iceland."
Five years ago in 2010 Bolivia scored a first among the countries in the world in sponsoring the participation of all institutions of civil society in the discussions on climate change and for hosting the First World Conference of the Peoples on Climate Change.
This event proposed to the world ambitious goals such as the reduction of green house emissions by 50% below the levels of 1990, ten times more that the goal established in the Kyoto Protocol.
The First World Conference also proposed the creation of a Climatic Justice Court, entrusted with the task of identifying those responsible for damages to the environment.
The Bolivian conference discussed the problems affecting all our planet, problems that are much more damaging to the peoples of the so-called Third World, who, paradoxically, least contaminate the globe’s atmosphere, lands and waters.
Bolivia will again host representatives of civil society in the Second World Meeting of the Peoples on Climate Change, to be held in that Andean South American nation from the 10th. to the 12th. of this month of October.
The meeting will examine the “threats of capitalism against daily life and the needed actions to adequately face climate change”.
This new meeting has a special significance due to its closeness to the upcoming Conference of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, (UNFCCC) to be held in Paris in December.
The UNFCCC is a treaty first negotiated at the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. While the objective of the treaty is to "stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system," the treaty itself set no binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions for individual countries and contains no enforcement mechanisms. The treaty provides a framework for negotiating specific international protocols that may set binding limits on greenhouse gases.
The parties to the convention have met annually from 1995 to assess progress in dealing with climate change. In 1997, the aforementioned Kyoto Protocol was concluded under the provisions of the UN Framework.
The coming December meeting of the UN Framework will examine the results of the Bolivian gathering, to which the Presidents of Venezuela, Nicolàs Maduro, and Ecuador, Rafael Correa, have already confirmed their participation along with Bolivian President Evo Morales.
Bolivia is the natural scene for this new global meeting to discuss the threats now facing the world’s natural environment as a result of climate change caused by human mishandling.
Bolivia is very much advanced on the road towards the proper care of the natural environment and has already issued the so-called “Mother Earth Law”, which establishes the rights of the land, the need to exploit it rationally and for the preservation of natural resources under the principle of respect for the Planet Earth.
The meeting on Bolivian soil will generate concrete proposals for the protection of the environment that support our lives and which will be taken to Paris as an opportunity to hand a healthy green planet to the future generations.
