The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Kyoto Mechanisms

Type:

Book Chapter

Author:

David Freestone

Published:

2005

Publisher:

Oxford University PressOxford

Abstract Climate change has been described as a defining issue for the twenty-first century.1 On the one hand it poses an unprecedented and as yet still not fully understood threat to the global climate system upon which mankind depends; on the other hand remedial action requires an extensive, and expensive, overhaul of northern industrial economies which are still heavily dependent on non-renewable carbon-based fossil fuels. For decades scientists have understood the chemical processes by which emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases might warm the planet through the so-called ‘greenhouse effect‘, nevertheless it was not until the 1980s that inter-national concern about anthropogenic impacts on the atmosphere through such emissions came to a head, and it was only in the last two decades of the twentieth century that the United Nations took the first, somewhat faltering, steps towards recognizing and addressing the issue.

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