Two decades after the advent of the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, its namesake city is planning to commemorate the agreement this year with a number of events while moving forward with its own plan to achieve targeted greenhouse gas reductions by 2020.
But with climate experts warning that faster action is needed at the national and international levels to mitigate the worst effects of rising global temperatures, municipal efforts like Kyoto's will need to be complemented by similar policies in neighboring urban areas to be more effective.
In December 1997, the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was hammered out during an all-night U.N. negotiator marathon. Under the agreement, the developed countries were obliged to reduce their collective greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 5.2 percent below 1990 levels with the purpose of reaching "a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system," the protocol said. But there were no numerical targets provided for developing countries.