Joeri Rogelj of the worldwide Institute for Applied Systems Analysis said that their study introduced an important new concept which helps them understand how major countries could still assume a leadership role on this highly fragmented playing field.
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The statement noted that the announcement of the winners was part of wider efforts to mobilise action and ambition as national governments work toward adopting a new universal climate agreement in Paris.
The Paris Summit is scheduled to be held from 30th November to 11th December 2015. Negotiators at last week’s United Nations climate talks in Bonn, Germany, spent most of their time talking about finance. They have called for a major breakthrough that “advances a 10-point policy proposal “drawing on the concrete experience of people across the continents, and linking climate change to social injustice and the social exclusion of the poorest and most vulnerable of our citizens”. We know that finance is left to the last moments of negotiations and used as a bargaining chip”, said Tasneem Essop, head of WWF’s delegation to the talks. As at previous meetings, a struggle between goals of the rich and poor countries dominated the discussion. It [climate change] is a reality we have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
On October 5, the United Nations published its latest draft text of a potential Paris agreement, much slimmed down from previous versions.
This acknowledgement has been welcomed by virtually all actors within the green economy – including worldwide heads of state, development banks, global businesses, industry bodies and oil firms – who universally agree that an worldwide price on carbon would be the most efficient way of driving investment into low-carbon technologies.
These divisions on climate finance also reflect a key cross-cutting area of tension around the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” (CBDR) between developed and developing nations on addressing climate change.
(“The USA [House] and Senate are the two biggest blocks to global progress on climate”, Dixon says.) Meanwhile, opinion polls suggest that voters, historically ambivalent about climate issues, are becoming more concerned.
A number of textual insertions were made last week regarding markets, after several parties expressed concern that references to worldwide emissions trading were largely dropped from the co-chairs’ non-paper. The narrative needs to be about systemic change and creating a world that is at once more equal and more ecologically sustainable, and in which the majority of people are better off than they are now.
At present, countries are divided on how to deal with the situation and reduce greenhouse emissions.
The text notes that countries should “pursue limitation or reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from worldwide aviation and marine bunker fuels” through the ICAO and IMO respectively. These experts expect Paris to provide a “hook” that would provide for the use of worldwide emissions transfers, which could then allow interested parties to develop the rules for doing so elsewhere, or at a later date in the climate talks.
At the same time, she reiterated a message she’s said several times in the run-up to Paris: that the new deal won’t put the planet on a pathway to limit warming since pre-industrial times to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
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Second, the conference should establish provisions for a periodic cycle of regular review under which countries must bring forward progressively tighter emissions reductions and ramp up actions. Despite this, Exxon concealed its own findings that fossil fuels cause global warming, alter the climate and melt the Arctic ice. But that doesn’t mean that the Sophie’s Choice at the heart of mitigation efforts about which lives in which countries matter more has disappeared.
