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| Lord Nicholas Stern
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Agreement on climate change may be within reach at the global warming summit in Copenhagen but agreed targets may not be enough.
Representatives of 192 countries are due to begin the summit today and they will be joined by world leaders at the end of next week, including Barack Obama, US president.
The former UK adviser on climate change Lord Nicholas Stern said governments’ pledges on greenhouse gases would be almost enough to reduce emissions to levels that would hold global temperature rises to no more than 2ºC above pre-industrial levels.
That is the target set by the UN climate change panel for the Copenhagen meeting and is regarded as the temperature rise limit of safety, before the process would become irreversible.
The tabled pledges would reduce annual emissions to about 46bn tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2020, according to the analysis. To reach the level required to hold temperatures at a 2ºC increase, emissions should be no more than 44bn tonnes by that date and additional deeper cuts will then be needed by 2050.
Lord Stern said that there was a gap of up to 5bn tonnes between the cuts that the most ambitious targets would deliver and what was needed to reach 44bn tonnes by 2020. He called on the EU to offer its higher proposed target, of a 30 per cent cut by 2020 instead of 20 per cent.
Yvo de Boer, the UN's top climate official, said on Sunday that despite unprecedented unity and concessions, industrial countriesand emerging nations need to dig deeper.
"Time is up," de Boer said."Over the next two weeks governments have to deliver."
“In 2020 we project total GHG (greenhouse gases) emissions to be around 55 billion tonnes CO2 equivalent per year from all sources, a reduction of about 3 billion tonnes compared to business as usual. In ten years from now global emissions will already have to be well below current levels of about 46 billion tonnes (in 2008) to have much chance of meeting temperature goals such as 2°C, as called for by the major emitters globally, or below 1.5°C as put forward by the Small Island States and Least Developed Countries as essential for their survival,” said Dr. Bill Hare of Climate Analytics and the German Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
The Climate Action Tracker shows the impact of country target commitments.
Around 25-40% reductions by industrialised countries by 2020 from 1990 GHG emissions levels are described as necessary by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
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