Tag: climate change

Leaders of the Catholic Church will call on rich nations to contribute USD 150 billion a year to helping the developing world cope with the devastating consequences of climate change when they attend a UN summit in New York this week, Cardinal Keith O'Brien, Archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, told EurActiv in an interview.

Upfront funding for a post-Kyoto climate treaty will be high on the agenda when European leaders meet this evening to prepare for next week's G20 summit in Pittsburgh in a bid to make headway in stalled global negotiations.

Scientists should not meddle with the Earth's complex climate by experimenting with futuristic geo-engineering options when softer approaches are available, Frank Raes, head of the climate change unit at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, told EurActiv in an interview.

The EU could offer 2-15 billion euros a year to help developing countries fight climate change and adapt to its predicted devastating consequences, the European Commission said yesterday (10 September).

In a commentary sent to EurActiv, UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband calls on EU leaders to show more ambition in their efforts to close a new UN-sponsored climate treaty this December and suggests that EU countries embark on a new "environmental union".

The European Union has scaled back plans to give billions of euros to poor countries to persuade them to help battle climate change, putting pressure on developing nations to raise their own contributions to a post-Kyoto agreement later this year.

The EU is prepared to put up to 30% of the money required at global level to finance an ambitious post-Kyoto climate treaty and overcome the current standoff in the negotiations, a draft European Commission document shows.

The EU's climate legislation risks turning into a "grossly distorting and expensive policy" unless it is seriously revamped, a leading British academic has warned.

The EU expects China and other emerging economies to cut their emissions by up to a third compared to business-as-usual scenarios, Swedish Environment Minister Andreas Carlgren said yesterday (1 September).

European Commission President José Manuel Barroso spent the summer preparing his programme for the next five years after his bid to secure a second term was put on ice by the European Parliament's political group leaders in July - EurActiv asked key stakeholders to assess the Barroso Commission's achievements and failures.

Evidence that methane, a dangerous greenhouse gas, is escaping from the warming Arctic seabed makes securing a new international agreement to slash global-warming gas emissions even more urgent, scientists warn.

The August round of climate talks in Bonn made little progress on the critical issues of financing and intermediate targets, but a deal on a new climate agreement by the year's end is still on the cards, Sweden's climate negotiator Anders Turesson told EurActiv as he shared his impressions on the state of the international climate negotiations in an interview.

France should aim to introduce a tax on carbon dioxide emissions by 2010 to help fight global climate change, a panel advising the government said on 28 July. The plan has already drawn fire from intensive fuel users such as farmers and fishermen.

A draft report, discussed by EU environment ministers at an informal meeting on Saturday (25 July), calls for the immediate mobilisation of $1-2 billion to fund climate adaption in low-income, vulnerable countries.

An extraordinary joint session of EU energy and environment ministers will this week start talks on how to achieve the Swedish Presidency's vision of a sustainable and eco-efficient economy.

"Our engagement for climate protection should be independent from Copenhagen," the newly-elected chair of the European Parliament's environment committee, German Social Democratic MEP Jo Leinen, told EurActiv in an interview, stressing that "if Copenhagen is a success, all the better; if not, we have to stick to our job".

A fair, new international climate regime should include sector-based agreements, leading to binding targets for emissions cuts in developing countries, the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), an influential group of CEOs, said in a paper published yesterday (15 July).

The G8's "historic" agreement to halve greenhouse gas emisisons by 2050 in L'Aquila, Italy this week was immediately condemned by green groups as "vague" and insufficient to halt global warming in the absence of a decisive mid-term target.

Nuclear power will play an increasingly important role in China's energy policy as the world's most populous nation seeks to improve its energy efficiency, said the country's EU Ambassador Zhe Song in a detailed and wide-ranging interview with EurActiv.

The €1.6 billion European programme to drive the aviation sector towards more environmentally-friendly development is now on track, according to Allan Cook, president of the Aerospace and Defense industries association of Europe (ASD).

"A Global Green New Deal will only work if it succeeds in addressing both pressing environmental priorities and pressing social needs in industrialised and in developing countries," argues a June report by Worldwatch Institute prepared for the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

Andreas Carlgren, Sweden's environment minister, said he is gearing up for the EU's push towards an ambitious international climate treaty in Copenhagen in December, as his country takes over the bloc's rotating presidency from the Czech Republic today (1 July).

Visiting the White House on Friday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has criticised US President Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan, praised US efforts to fight global warming and said a bill passed by Congress would help advance international talks on climate change later this year.

As Sweden prepares to assume the EU's rotating presidency on 1 July, business, civil society and human rights groups alike are lobbying Stockholm to find a way out of the financial, economic and climate crises by promoting structural reform and ambitious policies.