Global climate effort ‘still inadequate’ as talks continue

Background

The Copenhagen UN climate change conference in December 2009 was designed to outline a new international treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

But after two weeks of extenuating talks, world leaders delivered an agreement that left Europeans "disappointed" as it did not include binding commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions (EurActiv 19/12/09).

The result was a minimalist deal, called the 'Copenhagen Accord', which confirmed that deep cuts in global emissions "will be required" to maintain global temperature increases below 2°C and that countries will take action to achieve this.

The next high-level round of talks in Cancún at the end of the year is now hoped to deliver the necessary architecture for issues like adaptation, mitigation, finance, reducing emissions from deforestation (REDD), and monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV). 

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The upcoming Bonn talks (2-6 August) will prepare the ground for the high-level conference in Cancún, Mexico, at the end of the year.

However, agreeing on a legally-binding treaty in Mexico is no longer on the agenda as nobody wants to repeat the disappointment of the Copenhagen conference last year, where the bar was set too high. Instead, the talks are expected to agree on substance in issues like forestry, adaptation, fast-start financing and a mechanism for monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV).

An new international study, to be published on Monday (2 August) by Climate Strategies, a network of international climate academics hosted at the University of Cambridge, will argue that countries' pledged targets under the Copenhagen Accord will be "insufficient to drive the robust price in the carbon market needed to peak emissions by 2020".

"There is clearly a discrepancy between agreements made by world leaders for reductions in emissions by 2050 needed for the world to be on a 2°C path and the comparatively weak targets pledged for 2020. The only way to square these two outcomes is that future generations will have to make very deep reductions on a year-by-year basis after 2020," said Murray Ward, who led the study.

The research finds that the pledges use different base years, measure different greenhouse gases and include different approaches to using offsets. Moreover, they do not take into account the effect of the global recession on emissions in 2020, it adds. 

"A priority for the ongoing negotiations under the UNFCCC should be to establish a common framework so that national emission pledges can be properly understood and compared. This would allow pledges to be translated into their full, precise and real effects, and allow negotiations to proceed on a secure basis," Ward stressed.

Heading for dangerous global warming

Indeed, analysis of countries' latest emissions reduction pledges shows that the world is still headed for global warming of 3.5°C by 2100, warned researchers from Ecofys, Climate Analytics and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). It is now generally accepted that the limit that cannot be exceeded without triggering dangerous climate change is 2°C.

According to the projections, carbon dioxide concentrations would reach over 650 ppm (parts per million) in 2100, which far exceeds the 350 ppm limit many countries are calling for.

Some developing countries have recently announced significant actions to combat climate change. For instance, Papua New Guinea plans to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% by 2030 and to be climate neutral by 2050, the researchers pointed out.

But the announced delay of climate legislation in the US has added to concerns that the world's largest polluter after China will not be able to meet its target of reducing emissions to 17% below 2005 by 2020. Beijing has already been criticised for its lack of ambition (EurActiv 28/07/10).

The researchers also reminded the climate negotiators of the task of closing loopholes that threaten to further dilute the actual emission reductions.

One issue is "hot air", the billions of unused pollution credits accumulated by Russia, Ukraine and other former communist states of Eastern Europe after the collapse of their economies in the 1990s, which, if carried over to a post-2012 agreement, could drastically reduce the ambition of the current pledges.

The research pointed out that Moldova, for instance, has asked for new hot air. Its pledge to cut emissions to 25% below 1990 levels by 2020 would in fact triple Moldova's emissions, which are currently 75% below 1990 levels. This would even exceed the emissions in Moldova's 'business as usual' scenario, it said.

Another bone of contention is new rules on how emissions from forests will be accounted for.

"The coming talks in Bonn will focus on possible accounting rules for forests in developed countries. These rules have significant implications on the stringency of the reduction pledges, creating one of the so-called 'loopholes' in the system," said Michiel Schaeffer of Climate Analytics.

The researchers calculated that accounting options preferred by developed countries would bring down the developed countries currently targeted emission reductions by five percentage points, from the estimated 11-19% below 1990 levels.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that industrialised countries will have to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 25-40% by 2020 to stand a fair chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change.

Such reductions are still a long way off despite the mounting urgency given that large parts of Europe, North America and China having been baking in sweltering summer temperatures (EurActiv 26/07/10).

A new 'State of the Climate in 2009' report said that global average surface and lower-troposphere temperatures have been progressively warmer during the last three decades than all previous decades.

It observed that key climate indicators such as land, ocean and air temperatures as well as sea levels keep rising, making the 2000s the warmest decade on record.

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