The Kyoto Protocol is an international treaty which extends the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that was agreed by some countries to reduce greenhouse gas emission, based on the scientific agreement that global warming is ongoing and could affect the global climate, and also contains concrete mandatory aims for the countries which have signed it.
The target agreed for industrialized countries was to reduce the green gas emission by about 5%. On the other hand some other countries were allowed to increase their green house emission like Iceland with 10% increase of emissions or Portugal with 27%.
Some of the methods allowed meeting the gas reduction commitments were:
1.- Use a clean development mechanism
2.- Allow developed countries to sponsor foreign research to decrease gas emission levels in countries of economic transition. In exchange the host country will provide the investor with emission reduction units.
3.- Trading emissions will give countries the opportunity to reduce emissions where it is most economically efficient to do so
4.- Compensating for emissions by increasing the number of a country´s carbon sink (Forests) in order to take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
