The US and Australia refuse to sign on and adopt the new rules. India and China are not held to the same mandatory greenhouse gas emissions caps.

Montréal (AsiaNews/Agencies) – The Kyoto Protocol aiming to cut greenhouse gas emissions has become fully operational after the UN climate conference adopted the final rules.

The 34 signatory countries—which do not include the US or Australia—passed the final regulatory measures by consensus at the Montreal conference.

"The Kyoto Protocol is now fully operational. This is a historic step," said conference chairman Stéphane Dion, Canada's environment minister.

Under the treaty, nations agree to limit emissions of gases that cause global warming until 2012. The conference is trying to set preliminary plans to further cut emissions when the accord ends.

The signatories hammered out a mechanism for trading pollution rights.

A system setting out sanctions for those who breach the treaty should be adopted before the talks end.

China announced that, despite being one of the world's worst polluters, it is already cutting greenhouse gases, and has called on the United States to join the global community under the Kyoto Protocol.

Environmental groups have denounced Washington at the conference.

But Harlan Watson, senior climate negotiator for the US State Department, said Washington would not be party to any agreement with legally binding targets.

"There's more than one way to address climate change," Dr Watson said.  "The idea that you have to be bound by a Kyoto-like structure to address the issue, we believe, is a fallacious one."

The Bush administration said Kyoto would cost the US economy US$ 400 billion and almost 5 million jobs, whilst excluding China and India—two of worst offenders—from mandatory emission caps.

"You cannot live without using energy," said Sun Guoshun, director of China's Department of Treaty and Law at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Mr Sun noted that whilst China is the world's second-greatest emitter of greenhouse gases—though far behind the US—it also has the largest population, 1.3 billion people.

It was unfair to expect China and India, with the world's largest populations, to ask their more impoverished communities to cut back on energy consumption, Mr Sun said.

For both, the "overriding priorities" are development and the eradication of poverty

Never the less, among the 20 most polluted cities in the world 16 are found in China.

Drought, crop failure and sand storms are some of the natural phenomena affecting some Chinese regions as a result of coal burning.

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