Issue of
February 17, 1999

Tricky negotiations led to agreement on climate change

BY KATHLEEN O'TOOLE

Officially, yesterday's agreement on tackling climate change will be known as the Kyoto Protocol. In truth, it should be termed the Estrada Agreement. Raúl Estrada-Oyuela, the Argentinean chairman of the central negotiating committee, was almost single-handedly responsible for forging consensus out of threatened collapse.

­Dec. 12, 1997, Financial Times of London

For three weeks, the members of two working groups had failed to select chairs. They were hung up over what, in fact, their working mandates were.
Raúl Estrada-Oyuela, the designated chair of the committee as a whole, felt desperate to do something. Drawing on his 30-years of experience as a foreign service officer and delegate to various international committees, the Argentinean ambassador to China came up with a plan.

"I created non-working groups. Instead of chairmen, they had non-chairmen," Estrada explained with a grin. "By doing that, we created a different environment in which to work, " he told a Stanford audience at the Bechtel Conference Center on Feb. 11.

As this year's Payne Lecturer at the Institute for International Studies, Estrada will give two more lectures on his ideas about the partnerships and roadblocks to mitigating global climate change. A native of Buenos Aries, he had served in Argentina's embassies in the United States, Austria, Brazil and Chile before he was asked to lead a U.N. effort to get 160 countries to jointly address the issue of global warming at meetings in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997.

The effort appeared doomed to failure when an official midnight deadline passed without an agreement. Estrada put together a new draft that incorporated outcomes of side meetings between key parties. He then worked through the night in a meeting of the committee as a whole. By the time Kyoto's garbage collectors hit the streets, he had called a news conference to announce an agreement had been reached.

Stanford biological sciences Professor Stephen Schneider, an expert on atmospheric warming who attended the Kyoto conference, said he considered Estrada a "miracle worker." Environmental groups were disappointed in the specific commitments that Estrada was able to get from countries, but the agreement itself was the first agreement to collective action on the problem and it established the principle of differential responsibility for developed and developing countries, he said.

How did Estrada pull it off? Not by asking the delegates to vote, he pointed out.

"Experience shows that when you have a decision taken by a majority, those who don't vote [for the agreement] don't follow it," he said.

Estrada announced a consensus had been reached on the Kyoto Protocol, but that did not mean there was unanimous support for the wording of it, he said. "If you need unanimity, you are giving veto power to each and every member."

Establishing a consensus, he said, is more a matter of finding out from delegates "what wording they could live with," even though they would not agree to it. In the case of climate change, the Kyoto Protocol would have been doomed from the start if for no other reason than the oil-producing states did not want any restrictions on fossil fuel consumption.

To successfully steer such negotiations, Estrada said a chairman needs information, a clear, practical purpose in mind, a well-honed sense of fairness, patience, a sense of humor and the physical strength to withstand long working sessions without breaks for eating. In more than 1,000 pages of proposals, he said, he had to be able to select what was both important and possible. From the outset, he said, he decided to put aside all discussion of the details of what greenhouse gas cutbacks needed to be because the scientific research was not yet adequate to determine such a target and would only bog talks down.

One of his most difficult tasks, he said, was deciding when to declare a consensus. Under the traditional U.N. rules of operation, a majority is necessary to challenge the declaration of a consensus by the chair, and so he used this rule to limit dissent.

One reporter, describing Estrada's modus operandi during the last session, put it this way: "Several times objectors were left open mouthed as Mr. Estrada brought down the gavel to declare a paragraph adopted by consensus when they had hardly finished stating their opposition. . . . What saved his approach from being draconian was his unflagging good humor and strictly unpartisan approach."

In the Kyoto Protocol that Estrada announced, industrialized countries agreed to accept legally binding terms for reductions in greenhouse gases averaging about 5 percent below 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012. Both environmental and business groups condemned it, with the latter vowing to block ratification in the U.S. Senate. A year later, however, at meetings in Buenos Aires, some companies announced a consortium to start carbon emissions trading, and advocates of the treaty were reportedly encouraged by efforts to set up a more formal ongoing working procedure.

Estrada's final lectures on mitigating climate change will be held at 4:30 p.m. on April 8 and May 20 at the Bechtel Conference Center. SR