Paris Perspective #37: 25 years later – The Kyoto Protocol and Cop - Stephan Savarese

This edition of Paris Perspective looks at the legacy of the Kyoto Protocol on the 25th anniversary of what was, in effect, the first legally binding international agreement on reducing greenhouse gases.

On 11 December 1997, the first international agreement of its kind – the Kyoto Protocol – was signed.

It aimed to cut the amout of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and, in doing so, reduce the number of extreme weather events that are growing in frequency every year.

The agreement mandated 37 industrialised countries and the European Community, made up of 15 nations at the time of the Kyoto negotiations, to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.

It also exempted more than 100 developing countries, including China and India, from the mandatory reductions.

Twenty-five years on, how effective has the protocol been? Have successive Cop summits succeeded? Have the promises by rich nations to reduce emissions had any impact on global warming? Will their actions prevent temperatures rising by 1.5°C by the end of the century?

At the Cop27 meeting in Sharm El Sheikh in November 2022, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called for an end to the "toxic cover-up" by companies who claim to be “carbon net zero”.

In this respect he cited companies that have invested in fossil fuel exploration and exploitation, companies whose actions have resulted in deforestation, and/or those companies that have offset emissions instead of reducing them in a practice known as ‘greenwashing’.

He descirbed this expansion of fossil fuel exploitation as "reprehensible" and noted that it could  "push our world over the climate cliff".

From 'catastrophe' to 'hope'

Although the Kyoto Protocol only entered into effect in 2005, it laid the foundations for the historic 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change at Cop21.

For now, at least, there has been a lot of goodwill, says Stephan Savarese, CEO of TechnoCarbon, a company that is developing low-carbon building materials to replace steel and concrete.

In 2021, after the Cop26 summit in Glasgow, for example, a UN panel got to work on drawing a "red line" around greenwashing and net zero targets from companies, cities and regions.

Everybody wants to be part of the transition process that is designed to keep warming below 1.5°C by the end of this century by adopting net-zero strategies, Savarese told RFI English.

Any rise beyound that  and the planet enters a situation "where we don't know what will happen, but [believe it will] probably [result in] catastrophic climate change," he said.

One key aspect in uniting the world in tackling climate change is communication, says Savarese.

"If we want to move away from that fear of catastrophic climate change, we need to give people hope. We need to start defining the solutions," he says

If people think it's too late to avoid catastrophe, that sends out a "really bad message", he adds.

"We have a choice. And that choice is not to choose extinction." 

 Climate transition

The first target set by the Kyoto Protocol was to reduce emmissions, but data as to whether it has been a success or not depends on when the data is being presented.

"The answer is probably yes. And probably no.We will have a few years where the emissions will go up and go down. We have the goodwill, but we haven't got our act together. The big focus over the next few years, is how do we get our act together?" Savarese explains. 

Loss and Damage Agreement

However, one of the most positive and progressive deals to come out of the Cop27 meeting in Egypt is the Loss and Damage agreement

It is designed to compensate vulnerable countries whose future is directly affected by climate change, such as the Seychelles and island nations in the South Pacific. 

"[The fund] should be €100 billion per year ... [but] that's just a fraction of the global effort to achieve climate transition, which is estimated to be over €1,200 billion per year ... [and] we haven't even done that. So of course, the acts are far behind the declaration. But at least we have the declaration," says Savarese. 

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Even with landmark agreements such as Kyoto in 1997 and the more recent Paris agreement which went into force in November 2016 , it has also become clear that small actions by companies and groups - such as Savarese's TechnoCarbon - could have a greater impact on mitigating climate change sector by sector.

Small acts for climate change

It raises the the question as to whether every gesture that aims to reduce our carbon footprint – from the household, to the office, to the factory floor – has an impact, in the global scheme of things?

"Yes," Savarese says. "We are millions of people working on this now.  And this is the first achievement,[notably] mobilising millions of people [to act in response to] climate transition.

"Everyone at their level has their way of acting on that," Savarese concludes. 

Watch the full video here.

Written, produced and presented by David Coffey

Recorded and edited by Vincent Pora and Nicolas Doreau

Stephan Savarese is the CEO of TechnoCarbon, a Paris-based company that is developing low-carbon building materials to replace steel and concrete.