No Paris climate deal better than bad one – former French climate minister

Serge Lepeltier says global warming deal at Paris in 2015 must be binding, as capital hosts pre-summit meeting
Arthur Neslen theguardian.com 10 Oct 14;

A French diplomatic effort to seal a deal on cutting carbon emissions at next year’s Paris climate change summit has opened with a warning from the country’s former climate change ambassador that it would be better to have no deal at all, than a bad one.

The World Summit for the Regions on Climate in the French capital on Friday and Saturday is a showcase for efforts to mobilise business sectors in a ‘bottom-up’ initiative to enable commitments on carbon cuts ahead of the 2015 UN climate conference.

The approach is in line with the ‘pledge and review’ idea proposed by the US in which countries would put the emissions reduction measures they are prepared to offer on the table for review at a later date. EU negotiators hope a climate deal next year will include a mechanism that could trigger moves to binding cuts if countries’ emissions go too high.

But Serge Lepeltier said that without agreed minimum ambitions to curb man-made global warming in 2015, the bottom-up approach could be “an excuse” for the lack of a comprehensive effort, with scattered results.

“There has to be a global agreement with binding constraints,” he told the audience of policy-makers, businesses and environmentalists on Friday. “Without those commitments, what is done by local authorities and companies will remain marginal.”

“Can we risk non-agreement in Paris? We can’t have a minimal agreement that won’t truly combat climate change,” he said. “We should take the risk of no agreement rather than accept a weak agreement.”

Lepeltier, a former French environment minister, insisted that failure to agree a climate deal at the UN Copenhagen climate summit in 2009 was not the disaster that it had been painted as at the time. “Copenhagen was portrayed negatively for many years but it enabled a lot of things to move forward that were decided in Cancún the next year,” he said.

The Cancún summit made progress on key developing world demands – such as the establishment of a Green Climate Fund, which is supposed to disburse $100bn a year by 2020. But it failed to achieve a collective commitment to reining in carbon dioxide emissions, which last year increased at their fastest rate in the atmosphere for 30 years.

Because of the wide differences between states with some commitment to cutting emissions and those such as Russia, Canada, Australia and Japan which have withdrawn from international treaties, UN officials have played down the chances of material emissions cuts emerging from next year’s Paris summit.

Bernard Spitz, the president of the French Insurance companies association, AFA, told the conference that if global warming continued on present trends, an estimated 20% of world GDP could be lost by the end of the century.

“In 2007, the cost of natural disasters represented €34bn, or 16% of the [French] insurance budget. In the next 20 years, that could double to more than €60bn,” he said.