World Gobbling Up Greenhouse Gas Budget: WWF

Chris Buckley PlanetArk 7 Oct 10;

Greenhouse gas emissions worldwide risk overshooting by a third the threshold beyond which dangerous global warming looms, the environment group WWF said on Wednesday, urging climate talks in China to tackle the gap.

Negotiators from 177 governments are meeting this week in the north Chinese city of Tianjin trying to agree on the shape of the successor to the current phase of the Kyoto Protocol, the key U.N. treaty on fighting global warming, which expires in 2012.

Climate talks so far this year have focused on trust-building funding goals, with little talk about countries' targets to reduce the greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and other sources, heating up the atmosphere.

The report from WWF said the world is precariously close to eating up its "carbon budget" -- the limit of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions that would hold atmospheric concentrations below levels likely to trigger dangerous climate change, says the report.

"If we imagine the global carbon budget as a giant cake, the world has already gobbled up most of it," says the report.

"The climate talks in Tianjin need to see at least some indications of this trend changing," said Gordon Shepherd, the leader of the WWF Global Climate Initiative, in a press release accompanying the report, which was emailed to reporters.

Carbon dioxide is a crucial part of the atmosphere and is absorbed and released by plants, oceans and soils in a natural cycle.

But mankind's activities from burning fossil fuels to deforestation are disrupting this cycle, leading to more CO2 in the atmosphere than can be absorbed by nature. This accumulation is on course to overspend a limited carbon budget.

BALANCING THE BUDGET

How to share out the shrinking carbon budget will be a contentious part of climate change diplomacy for a long time.

Nations need to contain global greenhouse gas emissions to the equivalent of 40 billion tons (gigatons) of carbon dioxide a year by 2020 to contain future temperature rises at below 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels, said WWF.

"But the world is on track to emissions levels of 47.9 to 53.6 gigatons, based on promised reductions in major economies -- which on past experience may well not be achieved," it said.

Fraught climate negotiations last year failed to agree on a binding treaty and climaxed in a bitter meeting in Copenhagen, which produced a non-binding accord that later recorded the emissions pledges of participant countries.

Officials in Tianjin hope to foster agreement on climate funds for developing countries, protecting carbon-absorbing forests and transfers of green technology. These would be stepping stones for a high-level meeting in Cancun, Mexico, late this year.

That meeting, they hope, will build to a binding agreement late next year. Some developed nations want a new treaty that binds all the big greenhouse gas polluters to emissions reductions. Kyoto only commits rich nations to meet emissions targets.

The U.N. climate change chief, Christiana Figueres, said on Monday the climate talks should now focus on securing formal pledges of the emissions cuts vows already made, "fully realizing it is a first, necessary but insufficient step.

(Editing by Chris Buckley)

2020 emissions set to exceed dangerous levels by one third
WWF 6 Oct 10;

Tianjin, China: Global greenhouse gas emissions under current policy settings could be up to nearly one third more in 2020 than the trend needed to avoid catastrophic climate change, according to the latest “gigatonne gap” analysis conducted by WWF.

Plugging The Gap, a paper released today at UN climate negotiations going on this week in Tianjin, China, shows recent science setting an emissions budget of 40 Gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2020 to avoid dangerous climate change.

But the world is on track to emissions levels of 47.9 to 53.6 gigatonnes, based on promised reductions in major economies – which on past experience may well not be achieved.

“It’s clear that some countries are facing up to the necessary transformations of their economies but other countries have failed to endorse this new trend speedily and are risking the safety and prosperity of all,” said Gordon Shepherd, Leader of WWF’s Global Climate Initiative.

“The climate talks in Tianjin need to see at least some indications of this trend changing.”

The WWF analysis shows that governments have more than enough options to close the ‘Gigatonne gap’ between what has been pledged and what is needed. Promising options include rapidly transforming carbon-intense economies in the developed world, ensuring financial support for enhanced climate action in developing countries, and regulating new sectors and gases currently not covered by the climate regime.

WWF warns that failure to embrace these solutions would put the world at risk of overspending its remaining carbon budget – the total amount of carbon we can still afford to emit to the atmosphere before crossing the threshold of 1.5˚C warming over pre-industrial levels. WWF analysis estimates the global carbon budget for the period 2010 to 2050 at less than 1000 Gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions.

“Every school kid could calculate that if we let annual emissions grow to 50 Gigatonnes and more we will soon have badly overspent our fixed budget,” said Shepherd. “We must decrease annual emissions year after year and share the remaining budget equitably between industrialized countries that already used much of it and developing countries that had no such opportunity.”

The paper shows that setting science-based emission reduction targets in industrialized countries is the most effective solution, with a potential of stopping up to 4.3 Gigatonnes per year from being emitted to the atmosphere.

WWF made it clear that emissions calculations are considerably complicated by significant accounting loopholes which can allow double counting or even fictitious claims of emissions reductions. Closing known policy loopholes and accounting tricks currently undermining the integrity of emission reduction targets would add up to another 2.4 Gigatonnes per year by 2020.

For instance, the double-counting of climate finance and emission cuts from the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is estimated at 1 Gigatonne. Currently, such cuts can still be counted in both the inventories of developing countries where they occur and the inventories of developed countries that buy the generated CDM credits. Similarly, money spent by developed countries to buy CDM credits is often also counted as part of the finance support for developing countries they are committed to.

Truly additional financial support for developing countries to boost their low-carbon transition beyond the unilateral actions they pledge already would add another 1.7 Gigatonnes, while covering omitted sectors like shipping or aviation and eliminating non-additional CDM credits generated by projects that would have happened anyway could shrink the gap by at least 1.3 Gigatonnes.