Carbon Training International

On Friday 24 September the UNEP released its “Climate Change Science Compendium 2009” presenting evidence that “The pace and scale of climate change may now be outstripping even the most sobering predictions of the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC)”ⁱ released in 2007.

On Monday 28 September, the UK Met Office reported that if “greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise unchecked, it is likely that global warming will exceed four degrees by the end of the century”.ⁱⁱ

Dr Richard Betts, Head of Climate Impacts at the Met Office Hadley Centre, outlined the new research findings at “4 degrees and beyond” a conference convened at Oxford University to consider the consequences of climate change and concomitant implications for people, eco-systems and earth-systems.

Some of the climate related impacts reported by UNEP include:

At the “4 degrees and beyond” conference Dr Betts said: “Four degrees of warming, averaged over the globe, translates into even greater warming in many regions, along with major changes in rainfall. If greenhouse gas emissions are not cut soon, we could see major climate changes within our own lifetimes.”ⁱⁱⁱ

In some areas warming could be significantly higher (10 degrees or more).

Dr Betts added: “Together these impacts will have very large consequences for food security, water availability and health. However, it is possible to avoid these dangerous levels of temperature rise by cutting greenhouse gas emissions. If global emissions peak within the next decade and then decrease rapidly it may be possible to avoid at least half of the four degrees of warming.”^iv

In the Foreword to the UNEP Report, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon wrote “The science has become more irrevocable than ever: Climate change is happening. The evidence is all around us. And unless we act, we will see catastrophic consequences including rising sea-levels, droughts and famine, and the loss of up to a third of the world’s plant and animal species.

As pressures build for an internationally agreed response, we now have the once-in-a-generation opportunity to come together and address climate change through a newly invigorated multilateralism.”^v

The COP15 meeting in Copenhagen in December is the venue for this global agreement. In recent weeks Japan has committed to an emissions reduction target, China has indicated a range of actions and the EU already has targets for 2020 in place.

Whilst there are calls for Australia to delay action until after the Copenhagen meeting, the UNEP report make it clear that we must act now. We must pass the CPRS legislation in November and start acting to reduce CO2 emissions.

There is ample evidence to support early action; the effort required to reach a 2020 target will be easier if we start sooner rather than delay and the economic impacts and social disruption will be less.

To quote Ban Ki-moon again, “…the time to act is now and we must work together to address this monumental challenge. This is the moral challenge of our generation.”^vi

The UNEP Report is available at http://www.unep.org/compendium2009/PDF/compendium2009.pdf

The “4 degrees and beyond” conference details are at http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/4degrees/programme.php