Global Policy Forum

By Colleen Barry

Berlin - It is one thing for 150 nations to agree to significant cuts in greenhouse emissions by 2012 - and quite another to figure out how to measure progress. A U.N. climate-change conference in Bonn opening today continues the painstaking process of defining reductions in greenhouse gases specified in a 1997 protocol approved in Kyoto, Japan. That means tackling such nitty-gritty issues as how to measure emissions from everything from factories to barnyard cows.

"In the Netherlands, they know how many cows they have to within 100, and they have done calculations, and they know Dutch cows emit X amount of methane each year," a spokesman for the climate change secretariat in Geneva, Michael Williams, said. The trick then is standardizing the calculations so they are somehow valid for the other nations. "How is India going to do this? They have different cows, which eat different things. They probably don't even know how many cows they have," Williams said.

Such questions may seem esoteric. But reaching agreement on the ground rules for emissions reduction is essential for ratification of the Kyoto protocol by major developed nations. "This is spade work for the convention," Williams said. The Bonn conference is the fifth in a series of meetings on climate control that began in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, when nations committed generally to reducing emissions of six greenhouse gases. Binding targets for individual developed nations were set in Kyoto two years ago, when nations agreed to an overall reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions of 5 percent from 1990 levels during the period 2008-2012. Delegates hope to reach final agreement on the measures during the next meeting, which is tentatively set for the Hague, Netherlands, in 2000.

Beyond homing in on scientific measures, the Bonn conference hopes to keep the political momentum going, and will raise some hot political topics as well, probably at the end of the conference when ministers arrive. The conference is scheduled to run through Nov. 5. The U.S. Senate - which recently flexed its muscle by blocking ratification of the international nuclear-test-ban treaty - has said it will not take up the climate convention without "meaningful participation" by key developing nations and assurances on the costs of implementation. "There is a large question mark over the approval in the United States," the climate conference's executive secretary, Michael Zammit Cutajar, told reporters in Bonn last week.

American officials said that obtaining broad participation of developing nations and addressing the costs of the treaty will ensure its ratification. "We want to present the best treaty we can. It is precisely because we are committed to the process that we are insisting on these elements," said Roger Ballentine, a White House official who is coordinating the administration's climate-change work. So far, just 14 nations - all of them developing countries - have ratified the Kyoto protocol, which will take effect only after ratification by 55 nations, including developed countries that account for at least 55 percent of emissions.

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