Kyoto
Binding mandatory targets in national and international political agreements are the basis for getting to grips with climate change. WWF-UK works to ensure that the UK government continues to play a leading role on the global stage by driving forward an effective international climate change agreement to follow the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol, which ends in 2012.
The Kyoto Protocol
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), was launched at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Kyoto Protocol - adopted at the UNFCCC conference in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997 - is a step forward from the original Framework Treaty because it includes binding emission reduction targets.
The Kyoto Protocol requires industrial countries ratifying the agreement to reduce their collective emissions of global warming gases approximately 5% below 1990 levels, by 2012.
The Kyoto Protocol has now come into force. This means that at least 55 countries have ratified the treaty, including a minimum of industrialised countries which account for at least 55% of total CO2 emissions for 1990 from that group.
The Kyoto treaty came into force on 16 February 2005, after Russia ratified. Australia finally ratified the Protocol at the end of 2007 leaving the US as the only industrialised major emitter not to have signed up.