Tuesday 20 November 2007
Bonn, Germany - The industrial world is hurling more carbon into the atmosphere than ever before, and governments have a narrow window of just a few years to reverse the trend and avert calamitous climate change, the U.N. climate secretariat said Tuesday.
Though overall emissions are rising, U.N. projections showed that the 36 countries which pledged to cut carbon emissions by 5 percent under the Kyoto Protocol will easily meet their targets by 2012, and will emit nearly 11 percent less than they did in 1990.
Taken together, the industrialized nations showed a reduction in greenhouse gases from 1990 through the next decade, but that trend reversed in 2000, the U.N.-verified data showed. Emissions have been growing since then, reaching a near-record in 2005 and continuing to move upward.
"Emissions are going up in a worrying way," said Yvo de Boer, the general secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.
He said the growth was driven by continued expansion in the West and by the reviving economies of former Soviet-block countries, where emissions dropped sharply during the 1990s after the collapse of heavy carbon-intensive industries.
"We have 10 to 15 years to turn the trend of global emissions from up to down if we are to avoid many of the catastrophic consequences" predicted by scientists, De Boer said.
Emissions by the United States, which rejected the Kyoto accord, grew by more than 16 percent from 1990 to 2005, and is projected to rise to 26 percent by 2012.
The report was issued three days after a Nobel-winning U.N. panel of scientists, in its most comprehensive report to date, warned that unrestrained emissions of greenhouse gases, primarily from factories and vehicles, will lead to a radically altered world: Widespread floods, droughts, fierce storms, and rising sea levels will affect hundreds of millions of lives and drive one-third to two-thirds of plant and animal species to extinction.
Next month, about 180 countries will hold a critical meeting in Bali, Indonesia, to begin talks on a new regime to control emissions after the Kyoto commitments expire in 2012.
The United States renounced its initial acceptance of Kyoto in 2001, calling it imbalanced. De Boer said it was critical to involve the Americans in the next phase of emissions controls.
"It makes no sense not to engage the world's number one emitter," he said.
The figures released Tuesday relate only to industrial countries, but De Boer said China, India and other countries with large developing economies were also adopting strategies to curb emissions.
He cited the creation of a carbon trading market as a major achievement of the Kyoto accord. Countries which fail to meet their emissions targets can buy carbon credits from countries which surpassed their goals. Last year, this market was worth $30 billion, and is likely to double this year, De Boer said.
Countries also have gained credits by sponsoring climate-friendly projects in the developing world. He said 840 projects had been registered in 49 countries, and another 1,800 projects were in the pipeline.
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