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WASHINGTON — The climate change accord reached at Copenhagen in December passed its first test on Monday after countries responsible for the bulk of climate-altering pollution formally submitted their emission reduction plans, meeting the agreement’s Jan. 31 deadline.
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Ajit Solanki/Associated Press
Busy factories and traffic are part of life in Ahmadabad, India. On Monday, India was one of the countries that submitted pledges to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
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Times Topics: Copenhagen Climate Talks (UNFCCC)
Most major nations — including the United States, the 27 nations of the European Union, China, India, Japan and Brazil — restated earlier pledges to curb emissions by 2020, some by promising absolute cuts, others by reducing the rate of increase from a business-as-usual curve.
In all, 55 developed and developing countries submitted emission reduction plans to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the body overseeing global negotiations. Two major nations — Mexico and Russia — had not submitted plans as of Monday evening.
United Nations officials said that the countries that have already filed plans account for 78 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally.
The so-called Copenhagen Accord was pasted together in the final hours of the United Nations-sponsored climate summit meeting that ended Dec. 19. The skeletal agreement was not formally adopted by the conference, is not binding on the parties and sets no deadline for reaching a formal international climate change treaty.
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations’ climate change office, said that the submissions showed that the commitment to confront climate change on the part of the world’s nations was “beyond doubt,” but he urged countries to do more.
“Greater ambition is required to meet the scale of the challenge,” he said.
Analysts said that even if all nations met their promises, the world would still be on a path to exceed the Copenhagen agreement’s central goal of limiting global warming to less than 3.6 degrees above the pre-industrial era.
“The pledges put on the table to date do not put us on track to meet that goal and will make it very difficult for us politically and technically beyond 2020 to meet that target,” said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
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Source: New York Times