The protocol will become legally binding on its 128 Parties on February 16 2005,” the UNFCCC said in a statement received here, released after Russia handed the document to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in Nairobi. The Bonn-based U?FCCC, the offshoot of the 1992 Rio Summit, is Kyoto’s parent convention.
“A period of uncertainty has closed. Climate change is ready to take its place at the top of the global agenda,” said Joke Waller-Hunter, executive secretary of the UNFCCC’s secretariat.
Russia’s move removed a years-long question mark over the future of the landmark agreement, which aims to curb carbon gas pollution blamed for disturbing the Earth’s climate system.
Kyoto’s framework was agreed in 1997 but it took four years to agree its complex rulebook.
In 2001, the United States walked away from Kyoto, saying the cost for meeting its targets would be too high for the US economy, which is massively dependent on the fossil fuels that are at the source of the problem.
It also said Kyoto was unfair, because only industrialised nations — and not fast-growing developing ones such as India and China — have to make targeted emissions cuts under the pact’s 2008-12 timeframe.
Waller-Hunter noted that only four industrialised countries have yet to ratify the Kyoto Protocol — Australia, Liechtenstein, Monaco and the United States.
Australia has followed America in saying that it will not ratify Kyoto.
Together, those two countries account for more than a third of greenhouse gases emitted by the industrialised world.
“Reducing the risks of global warming will require the active engagement of the entire international community,” Waller-Hunter warned.
“I urge the US and other major emitters without Kyoto targets to do their part by accelerating their national efforts to address climate change.”
US abandonment stripped Kyoto of the world’s biggest producer of carbon gases and left the treaty on the brink of collapse.
Russia’s ratification was necessary for Kyoto to survive.
Its ratification clauses require a minimum threshold of approval by polluting industrial signatories for it to be transformed from a draft agreement into a full-fledged treaty.
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the protocol on November 5, just over a week after his country’s parliament voted to ratify it.
The instrument of ratification will be faxed to the UN’s legal office for scrutiny by lawyers, although this is just a formality, UNFCCC sources told AFP.
After the lawyers have given their approval, a 90-day clock starts ticking, at the end of which Kyoto will come into force.
Ministers from the UNFCCC countries — of which the United States is one, despite its walkout from Kyoto — meet in Buenos Aires, Argentina, from December 6-17.
The meeting “will provide the next major opportunity for governments, businesses and civil society to promote the innovative new policies and technologies that will create the climate-friendly economy of the future,” Waller-Hunter said.