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n June 1992, President Bush signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change on behalf of the United States and invited other signatories to join the United States in a prompt start on its implementation. Toward this end, he proposed that countries meet by January 1993 to present and review their national action plans. In his remarks to world leaders assembled in Brazil at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the President also highlighted U.S. interest in cooperating with other nations to share U.S. programs and to learn about other efforts proposed and adopted to address the issue of climate change.

In the negotiations that led to the Convention, the United States supported an approach to global action that focused on the development of national policies and measures to mitigate and adapt to climate change, recognizing that only concrete actions will enable the world community to effectively address climate change, and that measures and policies must be rooted in specific national circumstances and fashioned from a comprehensive set of options addressing all sectors, sources, and sinks of greenhouse gases. Under the Convention, the Parties will monitor the evolving science of climate change and will continually assess the consequences of the global response. As uncertainties are resolved, and as nations are better able to assess and compare the effects of specific policies and measures, the Parties to the Convention will be better able to determine whether, and to what extent, global concern about climate change may call for additional action. The Convention established precisely this kind of action-oriented process.

The Convention is scheduled to enter into force once fifty countries ratify it. However, as negotiators of the Convention noted, an early and effective start is important to the process. To this end, at the final nego

tiating session in May 1992, the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee adopted a resolution calling for a series of interim arrangements to begin as soon as possible. One of the principal recommendations was to invite "States and regional economic integration organizations entitled to sign the Convention to communicate as soon as feasible to the head of the Secretariat information regarding measures consistent with provisions of the Convention pending its entry into force." This document represents the United States' first communication to the Secretariat. It is made in the spirit of moving forward with the complex task of beginning the implementation phase of the Convention. This Plan identifies the types of programs, policies, and measures the United States is taking to address the issue of global climate change. As such, it is merely representative of the variety of actions the United States has undertaken. It is not―nor could it truly be an exhaustive list of all measures.

In addition, this document does not seek to identify or recommend additional policies and measures that might be taken. In this sense, this document and the process in which it has been prepared are not intended to be substitutes for existing or future decision-making processes, whether administrative or legislative, or for additional voluntary initiatives developed by or with the private sector. Rather, the compendium of actions identified in this document should assist in measuring and evaluating existing policies and measures and in establishing a basis for considering future actions.

The United States anticipates that its National Action Plan, like those of other Parties to the Convention, will be reviewed and discussed in the Convention process. Critical to this exercise will be the development and implementation of comparable methods for inventorying sources and sinks of greenhouse gases and, more particularly, for estimating the effects of specific

actions. Such methods do not yet exist. However, their development and implementation should be facilitated by a review of the kinds of information and the methods and assumptions presented in this document.

In accordance with the provisions of the Convention, the United States intends this document to represent the first iteration in a series of regular reports. The current National Action Plan was preceded by the U.S. Climate Change Action Agenda, presented at the first session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee in February 1991. An update in the spring of 1992 (U.S. Views on Global Climate Change) added a wide range of

additional actions to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions. As continuing worldwide research on the science and economics of global change (more than half of which is currently funded by the United States) generates new information and resolves existing uncertainties, as new policies and measures are formulated in response to this information and to the assessment of existing policies and measures identified in this document, and as national circumstances (e.g., economics, demographics, and legal relationships) continue to evolve, they will be reflected in future iterations of the National Action Plan.

Overview of U.S. Actions

The United States is taking numerous actions to address potential climate change. These include prudent steps to strengthen the ability of economic, social, and ecological systems to adapt to adverse change; concrete measures to mitigate the risk of potential climate change by limiting net greenhouse gas emissions; aggressive research to improve understanding of climate, climate change, and potential responses; and international cooperation to broaden the global effort in each of these areas.

These actions are based on the fundamental tenets of the U.S. approach to climate change, which are reflected in the Convention. This National Action Plan is the working demonstration of the U.S. view that a successful global climate change strategy must be: • Action-oriented. The Action Plan is comprised of concrete measures, rather than rhetorical declarations, and emphasizes detailed reporting of the underlying policy tools and methods used to implement and quantify real achievement.

• Comprehensive. The Action Plan addresses mitigation and adaptation responses in all sectors. It fashions a cost-effective mix of policy actions that limit sources and protect and enhance sinks (e.g., forests) of greenhouse gases. This flexibility is estimated to

reduce substantially the costs of achieving any given reduction in future warming potential, for the United States and for many other countries as well. The Plan also incorporates a full-accounting inventory of both sources and sinks of all greenhouse gases, ensuring that the environmental benefits of limiting the emissions of one gas or source are not erased by unreported increases in other emissions.

• Long term. The Plan takes into account the full range of social, economic, and environmental consequences of potential climate change, and potential responses, for present and future generations. The costs and benefits of trying to prevent such change are extremely difficult to measure, particularly because good predictions of new technology and of the local patterns of losses and gains due to changing climate are lacking. Nevertheless, assessments regarding an optimal policy strategy conclude that the best approach is to take low-cost actions now, without any overarching targets and timetables, and further recommend reassessing those actions in the year 2000, based upon vigorous research conducted in the intervening years.

• Flexible. The National Action Plan captures the variation in cost-effectiveness of different actions-both

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