UN CLIMATE CHIEF SAYS U.S. EMISSIONS REDUCTION GOALS NOT ENOUGH

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
10/5/12

While the United Nations’ climate chief expressed hope this week that countries like the U.S. will reach their non-binding emissions reduction commitments, she emphasized that current pledges are not enough to mitigate extreme global temperature rise. Executive Director of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Christiana Figueres told reporters this week in Washington, D.C., that while countries, including the U.S., appear to be making progress on their own in terms of limiting greenhouse gas emissions, greater commitments will need to be made by both rich and poor nations on the international front if they want to keep global temperature rises below 2 degrees Celsius, the cap agreed to in last year’s UNFCCC negotiations in Durban, South Africa. “Governments, I would say, are walking down the right path. They are engaged with each other… [but this] good progress is not enough,” Figueres said during a press conference at the International Emissions Trading Association’s North American Carbon Forum earlier this week. “We need further emissions reductions, and above all the science tells us that we need to do this at a higher speed.”

Delegates from more than 190 nations will be meeting in Doha, Qatar, in November in an attempt to build on the commitments made in Durban late last year. At that summit, representatives, in eleventh-hour negotiations, agreed to set a binding greenhouse gas emissions reduction scheme for all nations—both developed and developing—by 2015 that will go into effect in 2020. Figueres said this week that she was not alarmed by some media reports from past months that indicated that countries like the U.S., China and India are considering backing away from their pledges made in Durban. “I honestly do not see any moving away from where Durban left us,” she said. “The beauty and the challenge of any text of agreement is that it is always, as negotiators call it, creatively ambiguous, and that’s what allows those agreements to actually take place. So the fact that many different countries are using…the ambiguity of the text to begin to do the work they need to do is not a surprise. That’s exactly what they need to do.” During the Doha meeting, delegates are also expected to finalize the structure of a second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to begin early next year.

Figueres: U.S. on Track to Meet 17 Percent Goal

In her remarks, Figueres said she believes that the U.S. is on track to meet its voluntary goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, as are countries like China and India that have different objectives in place. “I have no reason to doubt what countries are saying,” she said. “It’s a very good start, but having said all of this, none of these pledges—even taken as a whole—are enough.” Figueres emphasized the need for both international-level, top-down emissions reduction pledges and local, regional and national efforts to do the same from the bottom-up in order to meet those targets. “It takes a village, in this case the globe, doing their utmost. You cannot export this responsibility,” she said.