Did the Kyoto Protocol fail? An evaluation of the effect of the Kyoto Protocol on CO2 emissions

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Introduction

Among the six dominant greenhouse gases (GHG) mentioned by the UNFCCC, carbon dioxide emissions (CO₂) are the main contributor to the bulk of accumulated GHG emissions, representing more than 62 per cent of total GHG in the 2000s and showing the highest growth rates over time. In 2009 total global CO₂ emissions amounted to 31.3 billion tonnes, an increase of almost 40 per cent since 1990, the base year of the Kyoto Protocol. The large regional variation in emission trends resulted in a 53 per cent share for developing countries versus 44 per cent for industrialized countries in 2009 (Olivier et al., 2012). Industrialized countries under Annex B of the Kyoto protocol are expected to cut emissions by, on average, 5.2 per cent below their 1990 levels by the year 2012, which would amount to 22.5 billion tonnes.¹Although these countries had reduced CO₂ emissions by about 7 per cent in 2009, a substantial part of the decrease was due to a drop in economic activity in response to the economic crisis. Surely, technical progress also could have played a role. Indeed, emissions could increase toward pre-recession levels as developed countries do recover to their normal levels of economic activity.

Given the current policy debate and the importance of evaluating the effectiveness of the already established climate agreements, the main aim of this paper is to analyze to what extent emission commitments from the Kyoto Protocol affected CO₂ emissions. In other words, how much more CO₂ would the countries have emitted had they never ratified the Kyoto Protocol? This question is important to evaluate present international climate negotiations and to encourage future climate negotiations, which could introduce binding emission reduction commitments for all countries without jeopardizing the growth of developing countries.

From a theoretical point of view, we base our analysis on a more elaborated version of the model proposed by Grossman and Krueger (1991, 1995). The model assumes that economic growth, measured by GDP, brings an initial phase of rising emissions followed by a subsequent phase of declining emissions. By adding a policy variable, namely commitments to the Kyoto Protocol, we introduce a crucial...