So far, very little thought has been given to them. In the Kyoto negotiating process, doubts about the integrity of emissions data have so far been put aside in the interests of getting the treaty signed and ratified rapidly. If the Kyoto Protocol is now blocked by the opposition of the Bush administration in the United States, some other approach to the threat of global warming will probably take form. But the same questions about data collection will still have to be answered. For most of the environmental treaties now in force, compliance with reporting requirements has been poor.
Reports are often incomplete and sometimes inaccurate.
The international bodies designated to receive these reports rarely have the capacity to audit or verify them. In the context of Kyoto, an instructive example of data troubles appeared in the negotiating proposals issued April 9 by Jan Pronk, the president of the current conference of the parties. To illustrate his concept, he provided tables showing how it would affect each country. First he did it with the numbers provided by each government. Parties used different methodologies, assumptions and definitions, and carbon uptake rates differ per geographic location, per forest type, and per management regime.