African Nations Urge 40% Emission Reduction Targets

Undeveloped nations have highlighted the prospect of outright destruction taking place unless developed nations implement even more stringent climate change policies to reach a level beyond what the UN considers realistic.  Represented at United Nations climate change discussions currently taking place in Spain, the world’s most impoverished nations have called on their developed counterparts to reduce CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions to no less than 40 per cent below benchmark 1990 levels within the next 11 years, as a minimum requirement.

“Anything south of 40 [per cent] means that Africa's population, Africa's land mass is offered destruction”, Sudanese official Lumumba Sanislaus Di-Aping advised journalists. 

The maximum 2020 target for any developed nation is currently 15 per cent – 25 per cent below what is now being asked - and UN officials do not seem entirely sure that the new figure is viable.  “I think to get to minus 40 is too heavy a lift”, Yvo de Boer - Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – advised news agency Reuters. 

Greenhouse Gas Emission Reduction

A 40 per cent-by-2020 greenhouse gas emission reduction figure was floated by a group of UN scientists two years ago as key to ensuring that the impact of climate change would be minimal.  This 40 per cent – the scientists said then – was at the end of a sliding reduction scale that should begin at 25 per cent.  Nations in Africa, however, now see 40 per cent as the minimum requirement, and speak of how sporadic food and water availability – linked to climate change – is already taking place.

National Emission Reduction

Under the terms of the Kyoto Protocol, 37 countries were compelled to work towards implementing national emission reduction goals of five per cent below benchmark 1990 levels, on average.  In December 2009, 190 climate change officials will gather in Copenhagen to discuss forging a replacement global climate change deal to take over from the Kyoto Protocol, which was established in Japan twelve years ago, and which has three years left to run. 

In related news, on November 4th 2009, US President Barack Obama expressed a new urge for a successful outcome to these imminent Danish climate change talks.  In comments made after a round of discussions involving European Union representatives, he referred to the need for the EU and the US to work towards a new climate change goal as “imperative”.

The issue of climate change, President Obama said, had loomed large between himself and his international equivalents.  “All of us agreed that it was imperative for us to redouble our efforts in the weeks between now and the Copenhagen meetings to ensure that we create a framework for progress in dealing with what is a potential ecologic disaster”, he stressed.

As far as the President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barraso, was concerned, the discussions had fuelled a new wave of confidence over being able to establish a new protocol.  “With the strong leadership of the United States we can indeed make an agreement”, Barraso stated.