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World Carbon Budget Being Gobbled Up, WWF Warns
Chris Buckley | October 06, 2010

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Tianjin, China. Greenhouse gas emissions worldwide risk overshooting by a third the threshold beyond which dangerous global warming looms, the World Wildlife Fund said on Wednesday, urging climate talks in China to tackle the gap.

Negotiators from 177 governments are meeting this week in the north Chinese city of Tianjin, trying to agree on the shape of the successor to the current phase of the Kyoto Protocol, the key UN treaty on fighting global warming, which expires in 2012.

Climate talks this year have focused on trust-building funding goals, with little talk about countries’ targets to reduce greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and other sources, that are heating up the atmosphere.

A report from the WWF said the world was precariously close to eating up its “carbon budget” — the limit of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions that would hold atmospheric concentrations below levels likely to trigger climate change.

“If we imagine the global carbon budget as a giant cake, the world has already gobbled up most of it,” the report said.

“The climate talks in Tianjin need to see at least some indications of this trend changing,” said Gordon Shepherd, leader of the WWF Global Climate Initiative, in a press release accompanying the report.

Carbon dioxide is a crucial part of the atmosphere and is absorbed and released by plants, oceans and soils in a natural cycle.

But mankind’s activities from burning fossil fuels to deforestation are disrupting this cycle, leading to more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than can be absorbed by nature.

How to share out the shrinking carbon budget will be a contentious part of climate change diplomacy for a long time.

Nations need to contain global greenhouse gas emissions to the equivalent of 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year by 2020 to contain future temperature rises at below 1.5 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels, WWF said.

“But the world is on track to emissions levels of 47.9 to 53.6 gigatons, based on promised reductions in major economies — which on past experience may well not be achieved,” it said.

Fraught climate negotiations last year failed to agree on a binding treaty and climaxed in a bitter meeting in Copenhagen, which produced a nonbinding accord that later recorded the emissions pledges of participant countries.

Officials in Tianjin hope to foster agreement on climate funds for developing countries, forest conservation and transfers of green technology ahead of the next meeting in Cancun, Mexico.


Reuters