JOHAN Rockström, resilience scientist and director-designate of the leading Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), and Ottmar Edenhofer, director of the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, expressed relief at the closing of the United Nations Climate Change Summit in Katowice, Poland. Both were key participants at the Katowice Summit.
“With countries recognizing the need for global collaboration to deal with the global climate crisis, the Paris Agreement is alive and kicking, despite a rise in populism and nationalism. With the rule book now finally adopted, the Paris Agreement can be implemented,” they said.
Overall, the Katowice decisions provide enough momentum to move on, they added.
Their biggest concern, however, is that the UN Summit in Katowice failed to align ambitions with science, in particular missing the necessity of making clear that global emissions from fossil fuels must be cut by half by 2030 to stay in line with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on October 8.
The Special Report on Global Warning of 1.5 degrees Celsius was approved in Incheon, South Korea, based on over 6,000 scientific references, and was prepared by 91 authors from 40 countries.
“This is a real concern. We continue to follow a path that will take us to a very dangerous 3 to 4 degrees warmer world within this century. Extreme weather events hit people all across the planet already at only 1 degree global warming. Especially, the US is a hard-hit victim, a nation that played an unfortunate role at the climate summit, which already suffers and will suffer even more in the future from an increase of regional droughts and hurricanes,” the PIK said in a statement shared to Database.
“Katowice is only one step on the long and winding road to achieving sustainable prosperity within a fossil fuel-free future. All of us need to stop tiptoeing and speed up our steps. And Europe can and must be a forerunner,“ the PIK pointed out.
“Once again, governments across the world have proven that they’re capable and willing to cooperate in order to protect their citizens from climate risks. Despite a growing number of populist governments, multilateralism succeeded,” Rockstrom and Edenhofer said.
“However,” they said, “the world needs more than climate policy targets and processes—it needs concrete measures, and they must be taken now. In this respect, climate change can no longer be simply regarded as the biggest market failure of all time—with the continued rise of global greenhouse-gas emissions after years of negotiation, it has also become an unprecedented government failure.
“Through appropriate policy measures—like effective carbon-dioxide pricing—governments have to build a new trust-relationship to citizens. Carbon pricing cannot solve everything, yet without it nothing can be solved. And governments can actually use carbon pricing to enhance social justice, because the generated income can and must be given back to the people, be it through electricity tax cuts, infrastructure investments
or Christmas cheques.”
The Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C, also known as SR15, was prepared in response to an invitation from the 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in December 2015, when they reached the Paris Agreement. The report was prepared under the joint scientific leadership of all three IPCC Working Groups, with support from the Working Group I Technical Support Unit.
The IPCC, the UN body for assessing the science related to climate change, was established by the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization in 1988 to provide policy-makers with regular scientific assessments concerning climate change, its implications and potential future risks, as well as to put forward adaptation and mitigation strategies. It has 195 member-states.
The IPCC provides governments and scientific institutions with information that they can use to develop climate policies. Its assessments are a key input into the international negotiations to tackle climate change and its reports are drafted and reviewed in several stages, thus guaranteeing objectivity and transparency.
The UN agency mobilizes hundreds of scientists and officials from diverse backgrounds, backed by a dozen permanent staff serving as the IPCC’s secretariat.
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