Washington

Some of the world's largest developing nations are already reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions — even though they have not yet been set targets. So says a report from the Washington-based Pew Center on Global Climate Change and the Battelle Memorial Institute, a private research organization based in Columbus, Ohio.

The report's authors say that this should be food for thought for the United States and Australia, which reject current attempts to limit their emissions in part because developing nations are exempt from such targets.

The study, which was released on 24 October, says that schemes implemented by Brazil, China, India, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey have together reduced the growth of their greenhouse-gas emissions by some 300 million tonnes per year over the past 30 years. The savings are the result of a wide range of programmes, from local renewable energy schemes to market reforms. In Brazil, for example, tax incentives are offered to families that buy smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, says William Chandler, an energy-policy expert who works for Battelle at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington.

Such projects are voluntary under the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement on limiting greenhouse-gas emissions. Developing countries won exemption from emissions targets on the grounds that limits might hinder growth and that the developed world is historically responsible for the build-up of greenhouse gases. The United States and Australia cite this as a reason for rejecting the treaty (see Nature 390, 215–216; 1997), but Chandler says the report shows that some progress is being made without targets.

The report may also aid negotiations for the second phase of the protocol, which which will cover emissions targets after 2012. Developing countries are likely to have to accept targets for this period, and they will need to have a quantitative understanding of their emissions to do so, says Tony La Vina, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, an environmental think-tank in Washington DC. “This study shows that it's possible,” he notes.

But the report will probably not be enough to convince opponents of Kyoto that developing countries are doing their bit, says Mahendra Shah, a senior scientist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, an interdisciplinary think-tank in Laxenburg, Austria. “I think opponents will brush this report off because it is not comprehensive enough,” he says.

In many developing countries, Shah points out, agriculture and forestry are the primary sources of greenhouse gases, but these sectors were not fully investigated in the report. Without a clear understanding of how these areas contribute to the picture, it will be difficult to convince the United States that developing countries really are working to reduce emissions, he says.