From Envirowiki

The "Australia Clause" is a clause of the Kyoto Protocol that sets the baseline emissions for Land Use, Land Use Change, and Forestry (LULUCF) at 1990. 1990 was a year in which Australia's greenhouse gas emissions happened to be increased by about 30% through LULUCF^[1]. The meant that any subsequent measurements for Australia's emissions would very likely be far less than 1990 purely due to reduced land clearing.

Between 1990 and 2004, stationary energy increased by 43% and transport emissions by 23%, however LULUCF emissions decreased by 73%, making the total a negligible 2.3% increase. Without LULUCF, emissions increased by about 23% over the same period^[1].

[edit] 1 Text

Te "Australia clause" (so named because it applies almost solely to Australia, is article 3.7 of the Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC^[2]. Tee relevant text reads as follows:

Those Parties included in Annex I for whom land-use change and forestry constituted a net source of greenhouse gas emissions in 1990 shall include in their 1990 emissions base year or period the aggregate anthropogenic carbon dioxide equivalent emissions by sources minus removals by sinks in 1990 from land-use change for the purposes of calculating their assigned amount.

[edit] 2 References

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1} Macintosh, Andrew (2007-03-13). "Cooking the greenhouse books" (News). ScienceAlert. Retrieved on 2008-12-16.
2. ↑ http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/convkp/kpeng.html