More than a decade after world leaders pledged to avert ”dangerous” climate change, a report card on their efforts so far might read: ”Must try harder”.
Rising industrial emissions of greenhouse gases, acrimony between Washington and many of its allies over policy and a report this week that the world economy risks a 1930s-style Depression by failing to act are among reasons for gloom.
Yet some see hope in widening concern that the use of fossil fuels is stoking global warming — indicated by billions of dollars invested in ”clean coal”, wind or solar energy or by campaigns to get people to turn off unnecessary lights at home.
”Of course, we must try harder,” said Finland’s Environment Minister Jan-Erik Enestam, whose country holds the rotating presidency of the European Union.
”What we have in place at the moment is nothing more than a very modest start,” said Yvo de Boer, head of the United Nation’s Climate Change Secretariat in Bonn.
Even so, he added: ”I think we’ve achieved a great deal.”
The UN’s 1992 Climate Convention and its 1997 Kyoto Protocol laid out principles for trimming emissions from power plants, factories and cars — seen by most scientists as the main causes of global warming.
De Boer said some nations were now talking of a need for far deeper cuts, of 60-80% by 2050.
Almost 190 governments will discuss the next steps in the fight against global warming when they meet in Kenya from November 6 – 17 for annual talks reviewing climate change.
The Kyoto Protocol runs out in 2012 and the United Nations says progress is urgently needed on a global deal beyond then. However, few delegates expect the Nairobi meeting to yield any big breakthroughs.
Danger
The 1992 Convention’s stated goal is to avert ”dangerous” human interference with the climate system, but it does not define ”dangerous”.
Some environmental groups see danger already in signs of a shrinking Arctic icecap, rare storms and heat waves, or in the fact that the 10 last years — with the exception of 1996 — were the 10 warmest since records began in the 19th century.
”The world is not doing very well at all” in slowing warming, said Steve Sawyer, a climate expert at Greenpeace. Still, he said many people were ”beginning to wake up” to a need for urgent action.
However, a dispute over the Kyoto Protocol overshadows all efforts. Kyoto obliges 35 industrial nations to cut emissions to 5% below 1990 levels by 2008-12.
”There is of course a problem because the United States and Australia are not in the Protocol,” Enestam said.
Both pulled out in 2001. United States President George Bush said Kyoto would cut US jobs and wrongly omitted developing nations.
Enestam said the absence of the United States, which accounts for a quarter of world emissions, could give poor nations such as India and China an excuse to stall getting involved in curbing emissions.
Washington could hardly agree less.
”The Kyoto Protocol was enormously well-intentioned, it was trying to tackle a new issue, brand new, and I think it had some serious flaws,” said James Connaughton, chairperson of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
”I don’t want to denigrate the Protocol because it was important to have that conversation. But we can now learn, after 10 years of experience, about some of the more sensible and smarter strategies for going forward,” he said.
Smarter without Kyoto
The United States is making big investments in new technologies, such as burying carbon dioxide gases or promoting clean biofuels, twinned with voluntary measures to slow the growth of emissions rather than cap them as under Kyoto.
The Nairobi talks will try to work out how to involve Kyoto outsiders in longer-term UN plans.
The meeting — on a poor continent seen as particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change — has been given added impetus by a British report this week, which offered the most detailed study yet of the economics of global warming.
It said that ignoring climate change could lead to economic downturns on a scale associated with the 20th century’s world wars and the 1930s Depression.
”The task is urgent. Delaying action, even by a decade or two, will take us into dangerous territory,” former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern said in the report.
Inaction could cut global consumption by up to 20% in the long term — via more widespread droughts, storms, disease and rising sea levels — against a cost of just 1% of annual global output to avoid the worse impacts, he said.
The EU and many environmental groups say that a 2°C warming above levels measured before the Industrial Revolution is a threshold for ”dangerous” change. Temperatures have risen about 0,6°C in the past century.
Washington has not defined what would be ”dangerous” change.
”We do not have a long-term strategy. What we are focused on is short-term results,” Connaughton said.
James Leape, head of the WWF conservation group, said a rise of 2°C could herald catastrophic shifts. ”You could find as many as 3-billion people — almost half the world’s population — experiencing water shortages,” he said.
UN data show that greenhouse gas emissions by the EU were 0,6% below 1990 levels in 2004, well short of its Kyoto goal for 2012. U.S. emissions were 16% above 1990 levels, within the band approved by the White House for slower growth.
De Boer at the UN Climate Change Secretariat said it was too early to give a school-style report card about progress on climate change. The industrial world, he said, was just getting out its exercise book and pencil and sitting down at its desk.
”Now it’s ready to work on the exam,” he said. ‒ Reuters