Macroscope | Climate change takes on more urgent tone
For the initiative to succeed, the agreement needs to emphasise flexibility and international co-ordination with a spectrum of approaches
Last week, the European Union announced new climate change mitigation and energy policies. The package would reduce carbon emissions by at least 40 per cent from 1990 levels by 2030 - a clear advance on previous promises.
Critics have said the EU targets are not ambitious enough to keep emissions below a level that will prevent catastrophic global warming. The United Nations' climate chief said the initiative provided valuable momentum at a time when governments were pushing to establish a post-2020 global deal committing all major greenhouse gas producers to binding reduction obligations.
A UN climate summit in New York last month was billed as an occasion to build momentum for action at the next meeting where the post-2020 regime will be negotiated, in Lima in December. The new regime is to be agreed in Paris in 2015, for implementation five years on.
US President Barack Obama told the New York gathering that today's generation was the last with the power to prevent a global climate catastrophe. This contrasts sharply with outgoing Texas governor Rick Perry's assertion that man-made climate change was a theory concocted by scientists in their quest for funding.
An unprecedented 300,000 took to the streets of New York during the summit to demand action. Tens of thousands came out in other cities across the world. The naysayers may be in a minority but they still carry weight in the corridors of power.
We have witnessed years of battling over national rights and obligations in the fight against climate change - first over the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that grew out of the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, and subsequently over its extension and replacement.