Greenhouse gas burden sharing within the European Union

In 1997, at the United Nations conference on climate change hosted in Kyoto, Japan, the European Union committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 8 per cent in the period from 2008 to 2012, with 1990 as baseline. The EU members agreed to reduce their emissions jointly under consideration of their different national circumstances in a burden sharing agreement. The basis for this agreement is a sectoral bottom-up model, the so-called ‘Triptych’ approach. The goal of this thesis is to analyse the deviations of the EU countries’ emission  paths from their Kyoto targets. Therefore, interpolated emission allowances are compared to actual emissions in 2005. In order to find reasons for those different developments, sectoral emission trends, energy indicators and socio-economic data have been analysed for Germany, the United Kingdom and Spain.