The British minister for the environment, Mr John Prescott, had an apt phrase to describe the Kyoto climate change agreement reached after a chaotic and prolonged negotiation in the early hours of yesterday morning. He said it creates a "window of credibility" between developed and developing states which will allow confidence and trust to grow that global warming issues can be effectively addressed in the years to come.
Although the Kyoto protocol falls far short of what scientists advise is necessary to reverse current trends - and well short of what Mr Prescott and his European Union colleagues initially hoped to achieve - the agreement is an undeniably historic first step towards reducing the emission of six greenhouse gases responsible for changing the world climate, by an average of 5.2 per cent over 15 years.
This is a legally binding commitment - once it is ratified - which marks it out decisively from the aspirational framework agreed in Rio de Janeiro five years ago. Vital national and global interests are involved, which explains why the final negotiations were so emotionally fraught and uncertain. It will now be necessary to see it ratified and built upon at future meetings.
Credibility between developed and developing states revolved principally around agreement on the allocation of responsibility for making the first historic round of cuts in emissions. The decision by the conference chairman, Mr Raul Estrada, that a reference to voluntary cuts by developing countries should be dropped from the final text, infuriated the United States delegation and will have made it much more difficult to secure ratification by the US Senate.
But it preserved the principle that the greatest polluters should pay first, and most. In evaluating Kyoto's success it is necessary to decide whether it was better to extend credibility towards such states as China and India in the hope of securing their future co-operation with climate change agreements or to appease the neanderthal US Senate majority, which blithely asserts the primacy of its own national interest, although the US is responsible for 25 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions.
To be fair, both President Clinton and US public opinion are willing to go substantially further than the senators, despite the alarmist publicity campaign run by oil, gas and automobile interest groups. The chief US negotiator, Mr Stuart Eizenstat, described the Kyoto agreement as a "work in progress - not an end point, but the start of something very important". In order to restore US environmental credibility, it will now be necessary for Mr Clinton to campaign vigorously in favour of ratification; if necessary by carrying the argument into next year's Congressional elections.
The Kyoto agreement is undoubtedly flawed, but on balance it was worthwhile precisely as a first step in tackling the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The protocol appears to allow for too much flexibility as to implementation; the idea of emissiontrading, say between the US and Russia, is imaginative but cynical. It is unclear where the agreement will stand if incompletely ratified, especially by the US. It now goes back to governments and peoples, who must decide whether it does indeed have the credibility attributed to it by these exhausted negotiators.