European Union

An EU blueprint for climate success in Cancun By Connie Hedegaard, European Commissioner for Climate Action

Reaching a strong international Climate Change agreement remains a top priority for the European Union. Globally, the past decade has been the warmest on record, and recent data shows that across the world, January to May of this year were on average the warmest first five months of any year since records began to be kept in 1880. The recent heatwave in Russia, floods in Pakistan and drought in China are unfortunately consistent with an increase in the frequency and severity of extreme weather events that advancing global warming is projected to bring.

Last month [in July] an official Dutch report cleared the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of any errors that would undermine the main conclusions in the 2007 report on possible future regional impacts of climate change. Climate change will not go away, no matter what a small minority of sceptics want us to believe.

At last December's Copenhagen climate conference, the majority of countries recognised that global warming needs to be held below 2°C in order to prevent the most severe and potentially catastrophic impacts of climate change. This will require a coordinated international effort, in the form of a strong and legally binding global climate framework.

The Copenhagen conference made some progress in this direction. The non-binding Copenhagen Accord has, for instance, led to all major economies setting out pledges to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions or take action on them. Furthermore, the Accord includes pledges from the industrialised world to provide nearly US$ 30 billion in funding over the next three years to help the poorest and most vulnerable developing nations, in particular, to make a 'fast start' in tackling greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change. Almost a third of this funding will come from the EU alone, and we are on track to deliver this.

In 2007, the European Union gave itself a head start in developing the global low-carbon economy of the future - and the growth and jobs that will go with it - by unilaterally committing to cut our greenhouse gas emissions to 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. The EU is ready to scale up our reduction to 30% if other major economies do their fair share too. This offer remains very much on the table. And for the long term we have set ourselves the goal of cutting our emissions, together with other industrialised countries, to 80-95% below 1990 levels by 2050.

This year's United Nations climate conference, taking place in December in Cancun, Mexico, must keep up the unprecedented momentum created in the lead up to Copenhagen. Europe is ready for ambitious decisions in Cancun. The conference needs to deliver agreement on a set of decisions that captures progress achieved so far, including on institutional matters, and paves the way for a legally binding global climate framework to be agreed as soon as possible thereafter.

This package of decisions could include areas like technology cooperation; a framework for adaptation to climate change; a global scheme for reducing emissions from tropical deforestation; new carbon mechanisms; and capacity building in the developing countries. The latter is very much related to another important deliverable, namely transparency in how we measure, report and verify our efforts. The Copenhagen Accord already addressed this issue, but it needs to be further elaborated for industrialised as well as developing countries. These concrete projects can be financed from the 'fast-start' funding pledged in Copenhagen.

As we have repeatedly made clear, the EU's preference is that a legally binding global climate framework should take the form of a single new treaty. We are nevertheless open to considering a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol provided that other major emitters commit to take on their fair share of a global emissions effort as part of the wider agreement and that weaknesses in the Protocol which currently undermine its environmental integrity are fixed.

The latest round of the international negotiations, in Bonn last week [the first week of August], made good progress towards new commitments for Parties to the Kyoto Protocol but this was not matched in the parallel negotiations on long-term cooperative action by all countries. We urgently need the US and developing countries, and especially the major emerging economies, to engage more forcefully on mitigation targets and actions.

A second commitment period under Kyoto on its own, and without its weaknesses being rectified, would give absolutely no guarantee of keeping global warming below 2°C. Kyoto's exclusive focus on industrialised countries, and the absence of the United States from them, means that the Protocol obliges countries accounting for only around 30% of global emissions today. Yet, the fact is that the growth in global emissions is being driven more and more by the major emerging economies, as underlined by the recent Dutch data showing that cuts in industrialised world emissions last year were completely cancelled out by emissions growth in the fast-growing developing countries.

I remain convinced that Cancun can deliver an ambitious outcome. The climate needs it. The EU is prepared. I hope others are too.