What Happened in Bonn? - The Nuts and Bolts of an Historic Agreement

On 23 July 2001, negotiators from 178 nations reached an unexpected political agreement on how to proceed with the international struggle against unwanted climate change.Specifically,they set out detailed rules for implementing the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climat Change.Participants and observers in Bonn, Germany quickly dubbed the accord a turning-point in the fight against global warming. But the document enshrining the agreement was so technical and allusive as to be incomprehensible to all but experts.This pamphlet, prepared by analysts in the International Energy Agency ’s Energy and Environment Division, sets out the terms of the Bonn agreement in layman ’s language. As in several earlier publications of this kind, the IEA seeks to inform the public debate and place it in context in a thoroughly dispassionate and objective way.