Japan to buy Poland's emissions credits
By Osamu Tsukimori (Reuters), published in Guardian, October 14 2008
TOKYO, Oct 14 (Reuters) - Japan signed an agreement on Tuesday to buy allowances from Poland to emit greenhouse gas, helping Tokyo achieve its goals under the Kyoto Protocol, Japan's trade ministry said.
The deal, signed in Warsaw, is the fourth for the Japanese government following similar agreements with Hungary, Ukraine and the Czech Republic.
Tokyo is trying to diversify the sources from which it plans to buy 100 million tonnes of allowances from 2008 to 2012.
Japan is still in talks with Russia on similar arrangements.
Japan, the world's fifth-biggest emitter with 4 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2005, said it and Poland would cooperate in the U.N.'s Joint Implementation (JI) programme and Green Investment Scheme.
But the agreement did not specify how many tonnes of carbon dioxide credits the Japanese government would buy.
As part of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, the JI programme allows rich countries to meet emissions caps by investing in emissions-cutting projects in former communist countries or economies-in-transition.
Another scheme under the treaty allows industrialised governments that are comfortably below their emissions targets to sell the difference to other industrialised nations, in a trade that is not necessarily related to any emissions cuts.
Such criticism has forced governments to introduce binding clauses to the deals that force the seller to re-invest proceeds in low-emissions technologies. Transactions that carry this caveat are known as Green Investment Scheme (GIS) agreements.
Last month, Belgium bought 2 million allowances from Hungary under a GIS agreement, in which Hungary said it would invest the deal proceeds in improving energy efficiency in residential and public sector buildings.
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