|
President Gloria Arroyo said she wants the carbon credit mechanism
of the Kyoto Protocol to be retained to effectively fight global
warming.
The President, who spoke at the opening plenary
session of the first Clinton Global Initiative Asia Meeting in Hong
Kong, said the Philippines successfully used the carbon credit
mechanism for reforestration in the country.
The first term of commitment of the Kyoto
Protocol is ending in 2012 and United Nations member-countries are
looking at other means of financing the greenhouse gas emissions
program.
“Our needs are very small compared to China
and the US but we find the carbon credit mechanism very useful and I
hope that it can be extended beyond the period of the Kyoto
Protocol,” the President said.
Mrs. Arroyo said Toyota Motors Philippines Corp.
has been using carbon credits to reforest mountain ranges in the
northern Philippines. She added that carbon credits are also being
used in the Philippines to use methane gas from garbage dumps to
produce power.
“I think the carbon credits are very useful .
. . it is very useful for the Philippines,” she stressed, adding
that she attended several fora that made fun of carbon credits.
Carbon credits are a key component of national
and international emissions trading schemes that have been
implemented to mitigate global warming.
They are providing a way to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions on an industrial scale by capping total annual
emissions and letting the market assign a monetary value to any
shortfall through trading.
The concept of carbon credits came into
existence as a result of increasing awareness of the need for
controlling emissions.
The mechanism was formalized in the Kyoto
Protocol, an international environmental treaty intended to achieve
stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.
The end of the first commitment period of the
Kyoto Protocol would be on 2012. By then, a new international
framework would have been negotiated.
-- Angelo S. Samonte
|
