Poor urge deep climate cuts
By Alister Doyle and Gerard Wynn
BARCELONA, Spain – Developing countries said on Wednesday they risked “total destruction” unless the rich stepped up the fight against climate change to a level that even the United Nations says is out of reach.
Keeping up pressure at U.N. climate talks in Barcelona, the poor insisted that developed countries should cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 — far more than on offer.
The Sudanese chair of the Group of 77 and China, representing poor nations, said that even the most ambitious offers by the European Union were far too weak for a new U.N. climate pact due to be agreed in Copenhagen next month.
“The result of that is to condemn developing countries to a total destruction of their livelihoods, their economies. Their land, their forests will all be destroyed. And for what purpose?” said Lumumba Sanislaus Di-Aping of Sudan.
“Anything south of 40 (percent) means that Africa’s population, Africa’s land mass is offered destruction,” he told a news conference.
So far, developed nations are planning cuts averaging between 11 and 15 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels to slow climate change that could lead to more droughts, floods, rising sea levels, more powerful cyclones and a spread of disease.
But even the United Nations says that cuts of 40 percent would involve too wrenching a shift. African nations resumed negotiations in Barcelona on Tuesday after a one-day partial boycott following agreement on more focus on cuts by the rich.
“I think to get to minus 40 is too heavy a lift,” Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, told Reuters. Such a shift would require “going back to the drawing board” and would economically “come at a huge cost,” he said.
MINIMAL
But Di-Aping said “in real and absolute terms (the effort) is minimal.” He said rich nations spent billions of dollars on solving the financial crisis or on defense.
De Boer said there was a chance of deeper cuts.
“I can see some progress being made to make the numbers more ambitious,” he said. He said that he hoped Russia and Ukraine especially would look again at their planned cuts.
Cuts of 40 percent as demanded by African nations “would be extremely difficult,” said Anders Turesson, head of the Swedish delegation which holds the European Union’s rotating presidency.
“Even if the European union went down to zero it would be extremely difficult,” he told Reuters. He also said that it was key that the United States should put a figure on the table for U.S. cuts by 2020 in Copenhagen.
The United States is the only nation outside the existing Kyoto Protocol for curbing industrialized nations’ emissions to 2012 and the Senate is debating a bill that would cut emissions by about 7 percent below 1990 levels.
A panel of U.N. climate scientists said in 2007 that emissions by developed nations would have to be cut by between 25 and 40 percent by 2020 to avoid the worst of global warming.
African nations say that people are dying from disruptions to water and food supplies and that the 2007 report underestimated the pace of change.
