The most urgent issue that will come up for discussion at the upcoming Doha Climate Change Conference is the implementation of the rules that will govern the second period of the Kyoto Protocol.
Executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention On Climate Change (UNFCCC), Christiana Figueres, said that the protocol stipulating that industrialized countries would agree to cut their own emissions in a legally binding fashion came to an end on December 31.
As representatives from Barbados and the other Small Island Developing States (SIDS) met at the Hilton Hotel yesterday to discuss a range of approaches to address the adverse effects of climate change, Figueres said the Doha conference next month would determine how the second period of the protocol will effected and regulated.
Figueres said the Doha conference was important for Barbados and SIDS because the Kyoto Protocol was currently the only binding agreement that existed among countries that got them to legally cut emissions and it was clear that in order to move forward to a larger regime, it needed to be rules-based. (LK)
