The Minister for the Environment and Local Government, Mr Noel Dempsey, has welcomed the ratification today by the European Union of the Kyoto protocol against global warming at the UN headquarters in New York.
Calling it a ‘very important day in international action to tackle climate change’, Mr Dempsay said it was in ‘all our interests to take early action, and avoid more costly and perhaps more painful action in the future.’
The Kyoto pact, which originates from the historic 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro was signed in Kyoto, Japan in 1997, and is aimed at cutting emissions of the polluting greenhouse gases blamed for rising global temperatures.
It requires industrialised nations to cut their emissions by an average of 5 percent over the period 2008-2012.
But the US, the world's largest polluter, shunned the treaty shortly after President George W. Bush took office last year, arguing it would harm the US economy.
The pact would have required the United States, which accounted for 36 percent of the industrialised world's greenhouse gas emissions in 1990, to trim emissions by 7 percent from 1990 levels.
The Bush administration, however, has announced policy changes likely to push them up by 30 percent by 2010, the European Commission said. Over the last five years, US emissions rose more than 8 percent, said Margot Wallstrom, European commissioner for the environment.
At today’s ceremony at UN headquarters in New York, representatives of all 15 EU nations and the European Commission handed papers from their respective nations to U.N. Chief Legal Counsel Hans Corell, signifying their national legislatures had approved the pact.
Wallstrom called the ceremony an historic moment for global efforts to combat climate change but said Washington had to pitch in.
The United States is the only nation to have spoken out against and rejected the global framework for addressing climate change. The European Union urges the United States to reconsider its position, she said. All countries have to act, but the industrialised world has to take the lead.
The ceremony came while ministers representing the United Nations' 189 member-nations worked in Bali to complete preparations for a follow-up meeting to the Earth Summit opening in Johannesburg, South Africa, in August.