The resignation last week of Yvo de Boer, the Dutch diplomat, as executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, reflected his frustration over the Copenhagen meeting and problems in climate change treaty design.
In fact, the soon-to-expire Kyoto protocol before it was also flawed. Nearly all of the 36 industrialised rich countries in annex 1 (which excluded the developing countries) failed to fulfil the emission-reduction targets they had signed on to. The U.S. (along with Australia) had not even ratified the protocol. The Senate, in a bipartisan 99-1 demonstration of defiance, had also rejected the protocol under the administration of Bill Clinton.
The failure of Copenhagen lay in the fact that creativity was required to bridge differences between rich and poor countries. It was badly missing. Building international institutions requires that we seek their principles in actual practice, not utopian ideas. We need to build the new protocol on principles in existing international institutions, such as the World Trade Organisation. How can this be done?
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