By Ben Nimmo, DPA,
Brussels : A year ago, the leaders of the world’s eight leading industrialised nations promised that their children would fight climate change. This summer, they will have to show whether they are willing to do something about it themselves.
The leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the US are set to meet during July 8-10 in the earthquake-stricken Italian town of L’Aquila, with climate change high on the agenda ahead of UN talks in Copenhagen in December.
The last time when the leaders from the Group of Eight (G8) met in Japan in July 2008, they agreed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent before 2050.
Environmental groups attacked that pledge, saying that the leaders at the summit would be dead long before the target date, and that the target itself was meaningless, since it did not say what year would be used as the base for calculating the actual size of the cut.
Now the pressure is on for G8 members to set shorter-range targets which they themselves might have to implement.
Italy, which currently holds the G8 presidency, wants the meeting to agree that global emissions should peak by 2020 and that world temperature change should be limited to 2 degrees Centigrade above pre-industrial levels.
Those two targets are based on the research of the UN’s climate change experts, and have already been accepted in the EU.
But they have not yet been endorsed by the G8’s non-European members, with the US and Japan – the world’s two biggest economies – saying that it would be wrong to agree on a mid-term target and overall temperature goal before the Copenhagen talks.
G8 members are also at odds over the question of how each one should define its national emissions reduction targets.
EU members want the G8 to use 1990 as the “base year” for calculating cuts. The EU has already put that policy into practice by pledging to cut emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and to go to 30 percent if other major economies follow suit.
EU emissions have fallen by some eight percent since 1990, meaning that the bloc will have to manage a further cut of some 12 percent compared with 1990 over the next 12 years.
But the US and Japan, whose emissions have risen by close on 20 percent since 1990, say that they cannot accept 1990 as a base year, because this would leave them having to make much steeper cuts than their European economic rivals.
The duo, who are currently eyeing cuts which would bring them back to or just below 1990 levels by 2020, insist that any G8 deal should be based on the principle of equal effort from now on.
That is unlikely to go down well in the EU and Russia, who want to be given the maximum possible credit for their post-1990 cuts.
Meetings on the fringes of the G8 summit are also set to be fraught, with the Major Economies Forum (MEF) – the G8 plus Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Mexico and South Africa – also due to debate thorny issues of global warming.
The thorniest is the question of how rich countries should pay poor ones to fight climate change – and who counts as “poor”.
Estimates of the amount needed to support less wealthy states in the climate change fight range from $100 billion to $200 billion a year by 2020. Britain has proposed a $100-billion-a-year fund, to be funded by the sale of emissions permits and by development aid.
On June 19, an EU summit urged leading powers to agree on a formula for splitting the bill, based on their historical emissions and current wealth.
They also said that major developing economies should chip in.
Both calls are likely to provoke fierce debate in L’Aquila – especially since EU members have, as yet, been unable to agree how they themselves should split the EU’s share of the total global bill.
But with the Copenhagen talks just five months away, G8 and MEF leaders are likely to find that the pressure is on them to agree to action for this decade, rather than the next.