Brussels launches climate change strategy

The European Commission yesterday unveiled its proposed strategy for setting out a new global deal on climate change, which will involve Malta for the first time.

This ambitious strategy, which still has to be approved by all member states, is geared towards pushing EU countries into reducing carbon emissions and producing renewable energy.

If approved, it will be used as a basis for the EU's position at December's UN climate conference in Copenhagen aiming at reaching a global deal and will enter into force after 2012, when the current Kyoto Protocol ends.

Malta is not part of the Kyoto protocol, since when the agreement was hammered out in 1997, it was still considered as a developing country - so this time it will be roped in.

Malta's climate change ambassador Michael Zammit Tabona will be chairing the UN conference in December in his personal capacity as an international climate expert.

The proposals, announced by Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas yesterday, build on an EU deal agreed upon by the 27 member states last year to reach important climate targets by 2020.

They lay down that developed countries, including all EU member states, should continue to take the lead in international efforts to fight climate change by cutting greenhouse gas emissions, as a group, to an average of 30 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.

It is suggested that developing countries, as a group, limit the growth of such emissions to 15 to 30 per cent below business-as-usual levels by 2020.

Meanwhile, emissions from international aviation and shipping, which are not covered by the Kyoto Protocol, should be included in the overall targets of the new agreement.

Mr Dimas said that, to reduce global emissions, net additional investment worldwide will need to rise to around €175 billion per year by 2020.

"The public contribution of each developed country should be fair and comparable and should be negotiated as part of the deal," he said.

He warned that the talks in Copenhagen represent the "last chance before the environmental damage, brought by climate change, passes the point of no return".

Why is a new deal needed?

The average global temperature has increased by 0.74°C over the past century and is rising by around 0.2°C per decade.

Since it takes time for past and present greenhouse gas emissions to show up in higher temperatures, the window of opportunity for staying below the 2°C temperature ceiling is closing very fast.

The Kyoto Protocol was an essential step towards reducing these emissions, which are responsible for this warming trend, but was never expected to solve the problem on its own.

The protocol only commits industrialised countries to reduce their emissions by an average of just 5.2 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012.

This reduction is not enough to keep within the 2°C temperature limit, and in any case the US, the largest global emitter, never ratified Kyoto. International agreement on deeper, global emissions reductions is needed for when Kyoto targets expire in 2012.