PREVIEW: Record CO2 emissions provide grim backdrop to key UN climate talks in Bonn beginning today
NEW FIGURES showing that greenhouse gas emissions from world energy generation reached all-time record levels in 2010 should serve as a “stark warning to governments” that they must work harder to achieve a global agreement on how to tackle climate change, according to UN climate chief Christiana Figueres.
The latest estimate by the International Energy Agency showed that energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions last year were at their highest level in history, following a brief dip in 2009 due to the global financial crisis and economic recession in developed countries.
Contrary to expectations that emissions would continue to fall as a result of the recession, a record 30.6 gigatonnes of CO2 poured into the atmosphere last year. “I am very worried. This is the worst news on emissions,” one senior agency official told the Guardian.
Dr Fatih Birol, the agency’s chief economist, said it was a “wake-up call” for the international community. Unless “bold and decisive” action was taken very soon, he warned that it would be “extremely challenging” to limit the rise in global temperatures at two degrees.
Figueres said the estimate for 2010 was “the inconvenient truth of where human-generated greenhouse gas emissions are projected to go [under a “business-as-usual” scenario] without much stronger international action now and into the future”. The warnings came as negotiators representing almost 190 countries began to gather in Bonn for yet another round of talks that begin today and are due to last two weeks. They aim to lay the groundwork for the next major UN climate change conference in Durban at the end of this year.
Figueres, who is executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said its signatories needed to do more to avoid “dangerous” global warming. “I won’t hear that this is impossible – governments must make it possible,” she added.
They needed to strengthen the international framework to allow nations to make deeper emissions cuts and also to agree on “effective designs” for new institutions to aid developing countries – the green climate fund, technology mechanism and adaptation committee.
Only slow progress was made on these issues at an earlier round of talks in Bangkok last April, so the Bonn round is seen by environmental and development aid activists as essential for building momentum towards the Durban climate conference at the end of November. In Bangkok, even setting the agenda for negotiations was marked by bickering over their scope, with some developed countries – including the US – insisting they should be limited to the narrow range of issues agreed at last year’s summit in Cancun, Mexico.
But with the Kyoto Protocol due to run out at the end of next year, many developing countries are pressing for its renewal as the only internationally binding legal instrument that requires developed nations (apart from the US, which didn’t ratify it) to cut their emissions.
Their demand has been rejected by Russia and Japan, which insist that any new treaty must include China, India and other major developing countries. The US position is that every nation should just get on with implementing voluntary pledges to cut emissions.
As analyst Alex Rafalowicz has noted, Bonn “represents a pivotal moment for the future of the Kyoto Protocol, as any targets under the protocol must be submitted six months before the annual UN climate meeting in December. This six-month deadline falls on June 9th.”
Officially, the EU is committed to a renewal of Kyoto and has also pledged to ramp up its pledged emissions cut from 20 per cent to 30 per cent by 2020 – if other major economies also make significant cuts in the context of a global agreement using the “architecture”of Kyoto.
Everyone concedes that the pledges made so far under the 2009 Copenhagen Accord fall well short of what would be needed to achieve the declared goal of limiting the rise in global surface temperatures at two degrees; as a result “dangerous” climate change is likely.
According to the UN Environment Programme, cuts totalling 14 gigatonnes are needed if the world is to have any chance of achieving the two degrees goal. And with the record emissions racked up worldwide last year, this objective is becoming more and more elusive.
It also emerged in Bangkok that developing countries such as China are now doing more to close this “gigatonne gap” than their richer developed country counterparts, with 3.6 gigatonnes of emissions cuts pledged, by comparison with 1.9 gigatonnes in the developed world.
Indeed, a new study by the Stockholm Environment Institute will show that China’s emissions reductions could be nearly double those of the US by 2020. “It’s time for governments from Europe to the US to stand up to the fossil fuel lobbyists”, said Tim Gore, of Oxfam International.
