The Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate: Supplement or Alternative to the Kyoto Protocol?

The Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (APP) was announced in July 2005 and held its inaugural ministerial meeting in January 2006. While the partnership has been dismissed as a "red herring" to distract attention from the U.S.'s failure to address climate change, its members include some of the largest emitters and fastest growing economies in the world. Thus APP-member countries account for a much larger share of global greenhouse gas emissions than the 35 countries with binding emissions reduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol.In this paper we explore - in environmental as well as in political terms - whether the APP may be seen as a supplement or an alternative to the Kyoto Protocol. We argue that separately both approaches are likely to have a low environmental impact and that environmental impact is likely to be enhanced to the extent that they can be combined. Based on an analysis of the positions of two key actors, the U.S. and the EU, we further argue that there are interesting points of convergence between the U.S. position and the Kyoto approach as well as between the EU position and the APP approach. Our analysis indicates that there is potential for more coordination between these approaches than observers as well as the parties themselves seem to acknowledge. After a decade of trying - and failing - to develop internationally coordinated climate policies that include key actors, time may have come to start focusing on the extent of cooperation that is feasible given differences in national circumstances, both among and between developed and developing countries. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]