Brussels, 17/06/2003 (Agence Europe) - During their last Council in Luxembourg, the EU15 Environment Ministers expressed their unanimous determination to reach a political agreement as soon as possible on the new monitoring mechanism for Community greenhouse emissions. The agreement should be reached on 27 October. The mechanism in question was submitted by the European Commission in the form of a proposal of decision to adapt the way the current monitoring system works to the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. This mainly means methods of communication of data by Member States with a view to providing more complete and harmonised information. The new system will also serve to assess the future national programmes for allocating "permits to pollute" once the Community system for trading emission rights has been set up, and will provide minimum requirements for prompt use of the flexible mechanisms under the Kyoto Protocol (joint implementation of the targets for reduction of emissions and clean development mechanism for technology transfer to developing countries).
The Council's policy debate was mainly geared to the reference year to be used as a base year for the calculation of fluorinated gas emissions for statistical purposes. The Kyoto Protocol allows a choice between 1990 and 1995. Most delegations stated a preference for the year 1995 as proposed by the Commission. Belgium (which sees no point in having the same date for everyone), Sweden, Italy and the United Kingdom (which did, however, choose 1995 at a national level) hope to maintain the flexibility provided by the Protocol. Finland stressed it would be in the EU's interest to have a common reference year, but did not state a preference for either of the dates. France, isolated, backed 1990 as a base year as it believes it has the advantage of taking into account efforts already made by Member States which began to cut back their emissions levels before the others.
A majority current was in favour of including the European Climate Change Programme (ECCP) in the decision concerning the emission monitoring mechanism, as Belgium suggested, convinced that such an initiative would serve as a stimulus for adopting national measures. Denmark sees no point in transposing the ECCP into internal legislation. According to Finland, this would make the assessment of intangible political measures taken at the national level to reduce emissions more difficult. Spain called for clarification on the legal status of the European programme in order to understand why it should be worthwhile transposing into internal law what the Commission defined as a process for accessing additional measures required to make headway in the fight against global warming.
During the debate, Denmark insisted that the Commission and the Member States should reflect on clean methods of pressure to convince Russia that it should ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and so that the issue might be discussed at the informal Environment Council on 18-20 July in Montecatini.