The Kyoto protocol meant to reduce global warming came into force on February 16. It is a pact agreed by governments at a 1997 UN conference in Kyoto, Japan, to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by 5.2 percent of 1990 levels during the period 2008 - 2012. A total of 141 nations have ratified the pact and the treaty was launched despite resistance from Australia and a refusal by the United States to join saying that changes would be too expensive to implement and that the pact unfairly excludes big developing nations such as Brazil, India and China. The Kyoto protocol is the first legally binding global agreement to cut greenhouse gases.

Greenhouse gases means gases (like carbon dioxide) generated by burning fossil fuels such as coal, petrol and diesel. While the latter have helped industrialisation, they have increased the levels of carbon rich gases and other pollutants. Scientists predict that higher levels of greenhouse gases will cause significant warming of the earth by one to five degrees Celsius. This could cause potentially disastrous environmental changes like violent storms, expanding deserts, melting icecaps and rising sea-levels which will engulf coastal regions. Developing countries are expected to be the hardest hit. Only 39 countries - relatively developed ones - have target levels for the 2008-12 period. The protocol provides for ?flexible mechanisms? for countries to reach targets without reducing emissions at home. These include ?clean development mechanisms? where developed countries can earn credits to offset against their targets by funding clean technologies, such as solar power, or planting trees in the Third World that soak up carbon dioxide.

But Head of the UN Environment Programme, Klaus Toepfer, said Kyoto was just a first step in the fight to reduce global warming and that much hard work was needed. ?Climate change is the spectre at the feast, capable of undermining our attempts to deliver a healthier, fairer and more resilient world.? He is convinced that Africa would bear the burden of the world?s failure to act.Environmentalists held protests around the world to mark the event. At the official ceremony, Nobel Peace prize winner and Kenya?s deputy environment minister, Wangari Maathai, said the protocol would require not just efforts from governments and businesses, but it also needed a change in the way people lived.

The main criticism is that the protocol is ?fundamentally flawed? because there has been no ?joined-up thinking behind it?. The trends of global trade and economic development have not been taken into account. The exemptions of countries like China, Brazil and India - to give them the right to develop without hindrance - was laudable but it could lead to far greater global gas emissions, not less. With or without limits on greenhouse gas emissions, India and China would have developed at breakneck pace with their cheap labour and low exchange rates. The argument is that ?it would have been far better, and ultimately far cheaper, to have insured that they industrialize along the right environmental tracks, rather leaving them to become the top polluters well before 2012.?

The Kyoto protocol supporters hail it as a symbolic first step. But many bigger steps have still to be taken. If global gas emissions are really going to be reduced, all countries ? developed and developing - should be brought into the equation.