What countries are currently offering on climate
Since the fractious negotiations that produced a last-minute “accord” at the Copenhagen climate-change meeting last year, those in and out of government who concern themselves with climate policy have been in a state of some befuddlement. They wonder what it all means, how to build on it and whom to blame for its perceived deficiencies and the troublesome circumstances of its birth. Despite this the accord has already achieved a couple of the aims its framers intended. Neither is, of itself, earth-shattering, far less Earth-saving. But they are worth noting, not least for what they reveal about where climate diplomacy should be focusing.
The accord provided a way for countries to make public, if non-binding, commitments on climate change. By the early February deadline that was set for this, some 90 of them had done so. In the weeks since, various stalwarts of the climate-wonkery circuit have been working out what those commitments might mean. That process is made complex by the fact that countries can express their intentions in different ways, and that many have provided two or more levels of commitment: a low one that they say they will pursue regardless, and one or more higher ones that they will try for if enough other countries are also going high.
AFPThe unsurprising bottom line of the various analyses is that even if you add up all the high commitments, you do not get a package that keeps average warming below 2°C. In an analysis provided by the Climate Scoreboard run by the Sustainability Institute, a research group based in Vermont, adding up the more ambitious commitments and extrapolating to 2100 gives a 90% probability that global temperatures would be between 1.7 and 4.7°C above the pre-industrial baseline. Given that range, the chances of being in the part below 2°C are slim. A 50-50 chance of staying the right side of two degrees would require cuts something like half as large again.
Insufficient as they are, those high commitments remain pretty much the same as the positions with which negotiators arrived in Copenhagen. As such, they represent one of the accord’s modest successes. One of its purposes was to square away those offers in the face of a total collapse of the conference: to provide a ratchet that, while not offering progress, limited backsliding.
Another of the accord’s purposes was to provide a way for the world to move beyond the besetting problem of the Kyoto protocol. That protocol requires developed countries that have ratified it to reduce their emissions while imposing no such strictures on the rest of the world, and politicians from the rich world who are critical of Kyoto make much of this iniquity. They may be surprised, then, to learn that the bulk of the commitments to reduced emissions in the Copenhagen accord come from developing countries.
The effect is most striking if you look at the “low-abatement” figures—the sum of what countries say they will do regardless of other countries’ actions. Before Copenhagen, according to an analysis by the European Climate Foundation (ECF), a not-for-profit organisation devoted to climate policy, these commitments added up to an annual reduction of 3.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, compared with business as usual, by 2020. In the commitments under the accord that figure has risen to 5.0 billion tonnes, of which developing-country commitments account for 4.2 billion tonnes. The developing world has increased its commitment by two-thirds since Copenhagen. The developed world has cut its by about a quarter, from 1.1 billion tonnes to 800m tonnes.
The developed-country change reflects alterations in professed policy by Russia, Canada and a few others. The developing-country change comes mostly from the growth and firming up of the commitments on deforestation made by Indonesia and Brazil. One of the underappreciated aspects of Copenhagen was progress on the question of what can be done about deforestation, which currently accounts for a bit less than 20% of global emissions. Reducing deforestation is a comparatively cheap way of reducing emissions, with other benefits to boot. The scope for going farther than the current commitments, using various sorts of finance, remains high.
In increasing the amount of abatement from the 5 billion tonnes of those opening bids to the 9.2 billion tonnes of the higher aspirations, the onus falls back on developed countries, specifically America. If the American Senate were to pass a climate bill that put a significant cost on carbon, and thus provided cuts of the same size as those expected under the cap-and-trade bill which passed the House of Representatives last year, America would be widely seen as having raised the stakes with a commitment to a reduction of just under 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. In such a situation Europe might very well respond by increasing its own reductions by about 500m tonnes. That, in turn, could move other countries on to their high-reduction paths. In the ECF analysis, the indirect effect of American cuts equivalent to those in the House legislation, via increased ambition elsewhere, is even more than the direct effect. That is pretty impressive leverage.
Even in the high-abatement model, though, the developing countries are still offering greater emissions cuts, compared with business as usual, thanks mostly to plans for less deforestation. The problem—and it would be a good problem to have—is that those cuts cannot keep coming. Once deforestation falls to zero, which seems a plausible goal for 2030, the pressure for other forms of reduction will become even greater, and inaction now will make those reductions harder to achieve. According to the ECF, more than 50% of the plants that will be providing the world with electricity in 2020 have yet to be built. The more of that need that is met by high-carbon technologies like coal, the harder it will be to make big cuts later. And to make a big difference in whether those plants are carbon-intensive or not will take levels of commitment far beyond those so far revealed by the accord.
From The Economist online
Since the fractious negotiations that produced a last-minute “accord” at the Copenhagen climate-change meeting last year, those in and out of government who concern themselves with climate policy have been in a state of some befuddlement. They wonder what it all means, how to build on it and whom to blame for its perceived deficiencies and the troublesome circumstances of its birth. Despite this the accord has already achieved a couple of the aims its framers intended. Neither is, of itself, earth-shattering, far less Earth-saving. But they are worth noting, not least for what they reveal about where climate diplomacy should be focusing.
The accord provided a way for countries to make public, if non-binding, commitments on climate change. By the early February deadline that was set for this, some 90 of them had done so. In the weeks since, various stalwarts of the climate-wonkery circuit have been working out what those commitments might mean. That process is made complex by the fact that countries can express their intentions in different ways, and that many have provided two or more levels of commitment: a low one that they say they will pursue regardless, and one or more higher ones that they will try for if enough other countries are also going high.
AFPThe unsurprising bottom line of the various analyses is that even if you add up all the high commitments, you do not get a package that keeps average warming below 2°C. In an analysis provided by the Climate Scoreboard run by the Sustainability Institute, a research group based in Vermont, adding up the more ambitious commitments and extrapolating to 2100 gives a 90% probability that global temperatures would be between 1.7 and 4.7°C above the pre-industrial baseline. Given that range, the chances of being in the part below 2°C are slim. A 50-50 chance of staying the right side of two degrees would require cuts something like half as large again.
Insufficient as they are, those high commitments remain pretty much the same as the positions with which negotiators arrived in Copenhagen. As such, they represent one of the accord’s modest successes. One of its purposes was to square away those offers in the face of a total collapse of the conference: to provide a ratchet that, while not offering progress, limited backsliding.
Another of the accord’s purposes was to provide a way for the world to move beyond the besetting problem of the Kyoto protocol. That protocol requires developed countries that have ratified it to reduce their emissions while imposing no such strictures on the rest of the world, and politicians from the rich world who are critical of Kyoto make much of this iniquity. They may be surprised, then, to learn that the bulk of the commitments to reduced emissions in the Copenhagen accord come from developing countries.
The effect is most striking if you look at the “low-abatement” figures—the sum of what countries say they will do regardless of other countries’ actions. Before Copenhagen, according to an analysis by the European Climate Foundation (ECF), a not-for-profit organisation devoted to climate policy, these commitments added up to an annual reduction of 3.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, compared with business as usual, by 2020. In the commitments under the accord that figure has risen to 5.0 billion tonnes, of which developing-country commitments account for 4.2 billion tonnes. The developing world has increased its commitment by two-thirds since Copenhagen. The developed world has cut its by about a quarter, from 1.1 billion tonnes to 800m tonnes.
The developed-country change reflects alterations in professed policy by Russia, Canada and a few others. The developing-country change comes mostly from the growth and firming up of the commitments on deforestation made by Indonesia and Brazil. One of the underappreciated aspects of Copenhagen was progress on the question of what can be done about deforestation, which currently accounts for a bit less than 20% of global emissions. Reducing deforestation is a comparatively cheap way of reducing emissions, with other benefits to boot. The scope for going farther than the current commitments, using various sorts of finance, remains high.
In increasing the amount of abatement from the 5 billion tonnes of those opening bids to the 9.2 billion tonnes of the higher aspirations, the onus falls back on developed countries, specifically America. If the American Senate were to pass a climate bill that put a significant cost on carbon, and thus provided cuts of the same size as those expected under the cap-and-trade bill which passed the House of Representatives last year, America would be widely seen as having raised the stakes with a commitment to a reduction of just under 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. In such a situation Europe might very well respond by increasing its own reductions by about 500m tonnes. That, in turn, could move other countries on to their high-reduction paths. In the ECF analysis, the indirect effect of American cuts equivalent to those in the House legislation, via increased ambition elsewhere, is even more than the direct effect. That is pretty impressive leverage.
Even in the high-abatement model, though, the developing countries are still offering greater emissions cuts, compared with business as usual, thanks mostly to plans for less deforestation. The problem—and it would be a good problem to have—is that those cuts cannot keep coming. Once deforestation falls to zero, which seems a plausible goal for 2030, the pressure for other forms of reduction will become even greater, and inaction now will make those reductions harder to achieve. According to the ECF, more than 50% of the plants that will be providing the world with electricity in 2020 have yet to be built. The more of that need that is met by high-carbon technologies like coal, the harder it will be to make big cuts later. And to make a big difference in whether those plants are carbon-intensive or not will take levels of commitment far beyond those so far revealed by the accord.
From The Economist online
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