Emissions pledges trickle in for UN climate deal

IS THE climate finally right for a new deal on emissions? Several major economies have pledged to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, meeting the UN’s April deadline, with a view to signing a deal at a summit in Paris in December.

Top of the range is a 40 per cent cut from the European Union, relative to 1990 levels. The US has reiterated president Barack Obama’s commitment to a 26 to 28 per cent emissions cut by 2025, relative to 2005 figures, which Bill Hare of Climate Analytics, a think tank in Berlin, Germany, says will entail doubling the US reduction rate to around 2.5 per cent a year.

The EU pledges trump this, but allow wiggle room to use carbon captured by forest growth and land-use changes as a route to compliance. That could weaken the pledge on industrial emissions “by a few percentage points”, says Hare. Meanwhile, Mexico has pledged to cut emissions to 22 per cent below “business as usual” levels by 2030.

What sort of a deal this brings remains to be seen. The EU wants a legally binding agreement like the 1997 Kyoto Protocol; the US, China and others prefer voluntary commitments. David Victor of the University of California, San Diego, says the “bottom-up” approach of countries making voluntary commitments for international endorsement is more likely to succeed. “I am more optimistic than I’ve been in a very long time.”