National Climate Change Policy

In addition, considerable changes within national climate protection policy came about as a result of the introduction of the EU ETS. The obligations of industry up to 2010, which were entered into within the context of the voluntary agreements for climate protection policy, are to be found again in the emission goals of the German NAP, only to a clearly lesser extent. 

Ireland s National Climate Change Strategy (NCCS) was first published in October 2000, in advance of the seventh conference of the Parties (COP7) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at Marrakech. While this strategy contained references to the Protocol s flexible mechanisms and a commitment to develop a carbon tax by 2002, it focused on identifying actual measures to reduce emissions in each sector without identifying the policies to be used to ensure that such measures were taken. 

Mankind s impact on the global climate and whether pollution from modern energy use is indeed warming the Earth have become important issues for national and international policy makers. Political pressure and public sentiment are based on complex data sets that, alone, cannot tell the whole story. The ultimate question is whether our climate is becoming warmer because of the slow build-up in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations (1). The answer is not clear, because much of what we know about global climate change is inferred from historical evidence of uncertain quality. 

IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1995) Summary for Policy Makers Impacts, Adaptation and Mitigation Options. World Meteorological Organi2ation and United Nations Environment Programme. 

Having covered five northern Member States whose governments were all supportive of action on climate change and had adopted meaningful actions to limit GHG emissions prior to the NAP process, we now turn to five southern and eastern Member States for which the same cannot be said. Spain and Italy are countries where climate policy did not have the same salience it did in the northern nations that are presented first. Interestingly, the main effect of the lack of early commitment to climate policy was delay in submitting NAPs to Brussels, not significantly different choices. 

As all the other continental new Member States of the EU,1 Hungary is a country that is undergoing the process of transition to a market economy according to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), and shares most of their characteristics with respect to climate policy. 

Under the 1997 VROM Environmental Policy, the Dutch government is implementing one of the first examples of national eco-limiting tracking, utilising macro-level indicators. National and environmental targets have seen set on climate change, ozone depletion, acidification, eutrophication, toxic substances and solid waste dis-... 

The impact of climate change on freshwaters will necessitate thorough re-evaluation of national, EU and UNECE policies related to enviromnental protection. For freshwater ecosystems there are potentially major implications for the EU Habitats Directive, the Urban Wastewaters Directive and the Water Framework Directive, and for the UNECE Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLTRAP). 

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