Lesson 26 — Activity 2: The Kyoto Accord

In order to deal with the potential problems caused by climate change, the Kyoto Accord was created  in Kyoto, Japan, on December 11, 1997, and entered into force on February 16, 2005.

In this activity, you will learn more about the Kyoto Accord.

Before the Kyoto Accord was designed, governments began meeting to discuss climate change. One such meeting was in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil in 1992, which resulted in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This agreement, which is still in force, bound governments to take action to avoid dangerous climate change, but it did not specify what actions. Over the following five years, governments wrangled over what each should do and what should be the role of developed countries versus poorer nations.      

Those years of argument produced the Kyoto Accord in 1997.
The Kyoto Accord was an international treaty about global warming. The term treaty refers to an agreement made between groups or countries. In this situation, countries came together to make a commitment to reduce their levels of carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases. A total of 141 countries approved the agreement.

There were some notable exceptions, which included the United States and Australia. Both signed but did not endorse the agreement. One of the major reasons why the United States did not fully accept the agreement was the fact that developing countries like China and India were excused from the accord. They were excused because they are not the major contributors of greenhouse gases. The United States was also concerned about the cost of changing power plants and factories to meet the new standards.

Courtesy of Kango.com, Wikicommons

One of the speakers at the Kyoto proceedings was Al Gore, the vice president of the United States at the time.

Since global warming is primarily caused by burning fossil fuels, the Kyoto Accord encouraged countries to move to more environmentally responsible ways of producing and using energy. In Alberta, this meant changing from the coal burning power plants such as Genesee Power Plant to a more environmentally friendly form of power.

Under the Kyoto Accord, every country was to reduce greenhouse gases. There were different targets for different countries. For the European Union as a group, the target was 8 percent from the 1990 levels; for Japan, 7 percent; and for Canada, 6 percent.

 Unfortunately, Canada as a country has allowed the release of greenhouse gases to increase since 1990. Canada was actually required to reduce its use of fossil fuels by about 17 percent.

Self-check!