Italy has called for an end to the Kyoto Protocol after the environmental treaty's initial period in 2012, preferring voluntary agreements that would entice the United States, China and India to tackle climate change.
ROME — Italy has called for an end to the Kyoto Protocol after the environmental treaty's initial period in 2012, preferring voluntary agreements that would entice the United States, China and India to tackle climate change.
In stark contrast to the European Union's championing of the legally binding United Nations pact, Environment Minister Altero Matteoli said continuing Kyoto in its current form would be useless without the agreement of some of the world's biggest polluters.
"The first phase of the protocol ends in 2012, after that it is unthinkable to go ahead without the United States, China and India," Matteoli told reporters at Kyoto-related talks in Buenos Aires in quotes confirmed by his ministry on Wednesday.
"Seeing as these countries do not wish to talk about binding agreements, we must proceed with voluntary accords, bilateral pacts and commercial partnerships."
Under the pact, developed countries most reduce their emissions by an average of 5.2 percent of 1990 levels by the period 2008-12, a commitment which the ministry said Italy intended to honour.
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Signatories are meant to sign up for bigger cuts in a second period after 2012 in a rolling process aimed at bringing emissions down to levels that will not affect the climate, considered to be at least a 60 percent global cut.
Italy believes the United States, which pulled out of the pact in 2001, and rapidly industrialising countries which do not have emissions targets, might be willing to accept a voluntary approach.
But that would be a contrary to the legally binding Kyoto process which world leaders agreed Kyoto in Japan in 1997 after failing to make good on promises to stabilise emissions agreed at the Rio de Janeiro "Earth Summit" in 1992.
Closer to Bush
Environmentalists say binding caps are essential and that rich nations -- like the United States which alone emits a quarter of the world's and one-third of the developed world's man-made greenhouse gases -- must take action first.
The European Union persuaded the two other big nations, Japan and Russia to ratify the pact and has urged Washington to rethink its position on what it sees as the world's biggest environmental threat.
Wavering by Italy would put a big dent in the EU's united pro-Kyoto front, and Italian environmentalists accused the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of cosying up to Bush, who he is due to meet in Washington later on Wednesday.
"Italy risks going outside Europe," green groups Legambiente and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said in a joint statement.
"This position ... radically differs from that voiced by the EU in recent days and isolates our country in respect to Europe," they said.
"Never in recent years has Italy embraced in such a servile way the most anti-environmental positions of the Bush administration," said Italy's green party leader Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio.
Bush's other main European ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who becomes leader of the group of eight (G8) nations in January, plans to put climate change on top of the agenda and work to bring the United States back into the global effort.
Source: Reuters
