london

Spot the dinosaur: Greenpeace protests at Bonn meeting.

Two weeks of negotiations towards a treaty on greenhouse gas emissions ended in Bonn last week as they had begun — in deadlock. One observer described the meeting as “little more than a dress rehearsal” for the climate convention's annual conference next month in Kyoto, Japan.

The Bonn meeting's chairman, Raúl Estrada-Oyueela of Argentina, remarked that negotiations seemed locked in a ‘time warp’ with delegations repeating positions he had heard three decades ago. Demands from the European Union and developing countries for a 15 per cent reduction in emissions below 1990 levels by 2010 continue to be opposed by the United States, which favours stablilizing emissions at 1990 levels.

The United States continues to insist that commitments by developing countries must be part of the Kyoto protocol. Australia refuses to sign any legally binding protocol, despite earlier signs that it might do so (see Nature 389, 893; 893; 1997). Japan's compromise proposal of a 5 per cent reduction between 2008 and 2012 now seems the only realistic option on the table.

Estrada successfully resisted US attempts to include developing country commitments in the formal text of the protocol. These will now be discussed separately at Kyoto. But the United States angered many delegates by suggesting on the last day of the meeting that armed forces should be exempt from an emissions reduction protocol.

The draft document that now goes to Kyoto contains 10 articles, two annexes and an attachment, most of which are full of blocks of square brackets — denoting text that has yet to be agreed. The most heavily bracketed part relates to the timing and size of greenhouse gas reductions, whether reductions should be calculated according to a ‘basket’ of gases or individual gases, and whether reductions should be calculated annually or as an average over a period of years.