Paris climate summit: missing global warming target 'would not be failure'

EU climate chief and UN’s top climate official both play down expectations that international climate talk pledges will help hit 2C target
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington and Arthur Neslen in Brussels
The Guardian 4 Feb 15;

The European Union climate chief says talks at a major climate summit in Paris this year will not be a failure even if governments fail to keep warming below the dangerous 2C threshold.

The comments, downgrading expectations for a strong outcome at Paris, suggest that the architects of a global climate deal are already resigned to the prospect that governments will fail to aim high enough when setting out their targets for cutting greenhouse gas emission in the coming months.

“2C is an objective,” Miguel Arias Canete, the EU climate chief, said. “If we have an ongoing process you can not say it is a failure if the mitigration commitments do not reach 2C.”

The 2C target was the internationally agreed goal of the climate negotiations. But Canete, who was visiting Washington this week for talks with the state department climate envoy, Todd Stern, said: “Any step forward is a step forward.”

However, he added “but we want ambitious objectives for 2015”, and said it was crucial that negotiators agreed on an accounting mechanism for reviewing those climate pledges and then raising them to avoid catastrophic warming.

In Brussels, meanwhile, the UN top climate official, Christiana Figueres, was similarly downplaying expectations, telling reporters the pledges made in the run-up to the Paris meeting later this year will “not get us onto the 2C pathway”.

The sober comments from two of the top players at Paris were a further sign that officials do not see the meeting in December as an end game but the next phase of the effort to get governments to deliver action on climate change.

Emissions reductions should not be “a one-off effort but rather the start of a multi-period effort, throughout which countries will continue to increase their contributions,” Figueres said ahead of meetings with EU officials. “Every year there has to be more - no backsliding - and there also has to be a long term destination: climate neutrality by the second part of this century.”

Canete was operating on a similar time horizon, looking out beyond Paris to “long term objectives”.

In his speech at the Atlantic Council, Canete said the US was pivotal to a global climate deal – but he reiterated Europe’s preference for a legally binding agreement, which would be practically impossible for Barack Obama in the current US domestic political scene.

“A legally-binding climate deal would be the greatest single act for sending long-term clarity to the markets. And we will only get there if the US and EU are on the same page.”

In the short-term, however, Canete said he was pressing G20 governments to come forward with their climate pledges early.

That would give NGOs, think tanks, and other experts more time to assess the individual climate pledges and see how far they add up towards the overall 2C goal.

India – one of the world’s top emitters – has already said it will not be ready to come forward with its climate pledge til May or June, past the original UN deadline.

But Canete said: “If only the United States China and the European Union present ambitious pleges it is 50% of world emissions. If we put on board all the G20 it is substantial. We would like every single country big and small to make mitigation commitment. That is very positive for climate change.”

Hopeful signs but no miracle fix at Paris climate summit: U.N
Alister Doyle PlanetArk 5 Feb 15;

The world will take years to limit climate change to manageable levels, with no miracle fix at a Paris summit this year despite growing signs of action by governments and companies, the United Nations climate chief said on Thursday.

Senior officials from almost 190 nations will meet from Feb. 8-13 in Geneva to work on a draft U.N. deal to limit global warming. The agreement, built on national plans for curbs on rising world greenhouse gas emissions beyond 2020, is meant to be finalised at the Paris meeting in December.

Christiana Figueres, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, said it would take far longer to get on track to limit a rise in world temperatures to an agreed U.N. goal of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.

The Paris meeting may set five-yearly reviews of emissions targets. But the gap between national plans and a pathway of ever deeper cuts outlined by climate scientists "is one that we will close not in one year, not even in one five-year period, but rather over time," Figueres told an online news briefing.

Last year was the warmest since records began in the 19th century and average world temperatures have already risen by about 0.85C (1.5F), raising risks of heatwaves, floods and rising world sea levels as ice melts.

"It would be a fundamental ... misunderstanding of the complexity of what we are dealing with to even imagine that an agreement in Paris would in and of itself, at the turn of a dime, miraculously solve climate change," she said.

Still, Figueres said that there were encouraging signs, such as a call by a group of high-profile CEOs on Thursday for world leaders to commit in Paris to a goal of cutting net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050. The group includes Virgin [VA.UL] founder Richard Branson, Unilever chief Paul Polman and Tata International's [TATAI.UL] Ratan Tata.

Among major emitters, China, the United States and the European Union have already outlined their plans to limit emissions. Figueres said she expected all major economies to submit national plans for greenhouse gas curbs by Oct. 1, to give time for the Secretariat to give an overview before Paris.

(Editing by Mark Trevelyan)