Tokyo

The Japanese government has made its strongest statement yet in support of ratification of the Kyoto Protocol.

The statement, issued by a working group on global warming chaired by the prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, says that Japan should “pursue the approval of the Kyoto Protocol and passage of relevant bills for its establishment” during this session of its parliament, the Diet, which ends on 19 June.

The working group also encouraged the amendment of an energy-efficiency law and the creation of a new law to promote the use of electricity from renewable sources.

The statement, which could open the way for Japan and Europe to implement the protocol without the support of the United States, was issued as US President George W. Bush arrived in Japan, having just released his own, minimalist strategy for dealing with climate change (see page 821).

“As soon as possible, we want to push forward with the ratification of the treaty and with the establishment of the means for achieving the goals,” says Hiroshi Ohki, Japan's environment minister.

Ohki says he hopes that the United States will still participate in the Kyoto treaty, although he also approves of the latest US effort to “create a concrete plan of their own”.

Questions remain about Japan's readiness to make genuine cuts in its carbon emissions. The powerful Keidanren industrial group has lobbied with apparent success against laws that would impose such cuts, and against taxes on emissions.

“Industrial groups like Keidanren have pushed for voluntary measures,” says Ohki. “Whereas the focus of the US plan is on voluntary compliance, in Japan there will be a mix of both compulsory and voluntary measures,” he says. The first phase of the protocol, in 2002–04, will depend mainly on voluntary compliance, according to officials at Japan's economic ministry.

Some Japanese researchers are also sceptical about the treaty's actual impact. “The wide range of uncertainty, in things like absorption of CO2 by forests, has become a tool of negotiation,” says Syukuro Manabe, of the Frontier Research System for Global Change in Tokyo. “As far as I can tell, the Kyoto Protocol hasn't shown us how to deal with these problems.”

Ratification “could be an embarrassment, if Japan joins and then just keeps missing targets,” says another researcher, at the National Institute of Environmental Studies in Tsukuba.