Building on an ambitious effort to scale up green investments and reduce reliance on imported fossil fuels, South Korea this week became the first Asian nation to formally adopt a cap-and-trade programme for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. The news comes little more than a week after Mexico passed its own national climate target, showing yet again that major developing nations are not waiting around for the political winds to shift in the United States.
Approved on Wednesday, the programme is scheduled to kick off in 2015 and cover around 60% of South Korea’s emissions, enabling companies to buy and sell a limited and declining number of emissions permits. Like Mexico, Korea has committed to reducing projected greenhouse-gas emissions by 30% by 2020, although Mexico went one step further and committed to reducing emissions to 50% below 2000 levels by 2050 (see Mexico Sets climate targets).
An idea that was in many ways pushed onto the world by the United States during negotiations over the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, emissions trading is slowly expanding country by country, even as hopes of a single international carbon market fade into the future. The European carbon market remains the largest, but New Zealand’s market is operational and Australia has committed to bringing its system online in 2015. The wild card is China, which is preparing to enter the game in 2015 as well (although there is some scepticism that it will be ready for that deadline). Even in the United States, there is movement at the state level.
South Korea’s decision to move forward with carbon trading builds on earlier moves to beef up investments in green technologies. As with Mexico, despite some concerns about costs, the regulatory programme has broad political support from South Korean politicians who see a competitive edge in green technologies. Remarkably, Reuters reports that the measure garnered support from 148 of 151 voting lawmakers.
The move further blurs the increasingly fuzzy lines between developing and developed countries in the international climate negotiations (see our coverage from 2009 here: ‘Developing nations tackle climate’). This could help change the dynamic as the world gears up for yet another round of climate talks in the coming years, although it’s still not clear when or even whether the biggest emitters — including China and the United States — will be ready to sign on.
Photo credit: Andrew Currie