Countries are making progress on UN’s carbon deal targets
Most envoys have already filed plans with goals for 2025 and 2030
BONN — Countries responsible for almost three-quarters of the world’s greenhouse gas pollution have submitted pledges to reduce emissions, indicating progress toward a historic climate deal the United Nations is seeking by December.
Envoys from more than 190 nations this week finished a round of preparatory discussions for the Paris climate summit in December, vowing to produce a new text outlining options for their agreement in October.
The delegates, who met in Bonn, are discussing what sort of long-term goals to set out in the Paris deal and are considering the option of calling for a phase out of fossil-fuel pollution as early as the middle of the century. They’re likely to endorse the previous target of keeping global warming to no more than two degrees Celsius. Some countries are seeking more detailed targets on finance and actions to adapt to climate change.
“Are we going to do individual goals across these things, or are we going to a common goal, are those goals going to differ from the convention goal — this is the flavour of what we’ll see,” Daniel Reifsnyder, co-chair of the discussions in Bonn, told reporters at the end of the meeting on Friday. “We’re still elaborating these.”
Commitments from nations come in what the UN calls intended nationally determined contributions, or INDCs. They’re supposed to contain voluntary measures for each country to cut emissions, pare back fossil-fuel use, accelerate renewable energy and adapt to rising seas. Most of the nations that have already filed their plans have set goals for 2025 and 2030.
Pledges submitted so far cover almost 70 per cent of global heattrapping pollution, said Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the agency organizing the global talks. The 28-nation European Union pledged to cut emissions by at least 40 per cent by 2030 from 1990 levels. The U.S. wants to a 26 to 28 per cent cut by 2025 from 2005, and China promised to peak its emissions by 2030.
The deal in the works would wrest commitments for the first time from both industrial and developing countries. It’s intended to build on the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which required pollution reductions only in industrialized nations and set no limits for developing ones like China and India, where emissions have skyrocketed.
“I continue to see and hear very concrete evidence that every single country is fully committed to an ambitious agreement,” Figueres said. “The proof is in the pudding and the pudding is going to come out of the oven in Paris.”
World leaders including U.S. President Barack Obama, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have urged an ambitious agreement to reduce the greenhouse gases that scientists blame for global warming. Forging a landmark accord is a monumental task, with the talks bogging down in disagreements between industrialized and developing countries.
“In every country’s mind, the potential compromise is there,” said Laurence Tubiana, French special envoy for the Paris conference. “October is key because then we’ll have all the technical elements assembled in the picture.”