Copenhagen

United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen-COP 15
7-18 Dicembre 2009

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The rich-poor rift widens only days before the Copenhagen meeting
Big developing nations reject core targets for a climate deal, demanding richer nations to do more.

Rie Jerichow
03/12/2009 14:45

Just five days before the climate talks start in Copenhagen, China, India, Brazil and South Africa rejected a Danish draft that proposed halving global greenhouse gases by 2050, setting a 2020 deadline for a peak in world emissions and limiting global warming to a maximum two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times, European diplomats say, according to Reuters.

"We cannot agree to the 50/50 (halving emissions by 2050) because it implies that... the remaining (cuts) must be done by developing countries," South Africa's chief climate negotiator Alf Wills tells Reuters, partly confirming the EU diplomats' comments.

Alf Wills makes clear that developing nations could change their stance if industrialized states tightened their carbon targets.

The carbon reduction offers are far below those recommended by The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It says that developed countries need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and 80-95 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, in order to provide a "reasonable chance" of averting warming beyond two degrees Celcius above pre-industrial temperature that would have significant risks of severe and irreversible impacts on human and ecological systems.

Yvo de Boer, Execute Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) agrees that the climate promises by industrialized countries are insufficient.
The emissions reductions offered by rich nations as a group "are not yet where science says they need to be if we're going to avoid the worst impacts of climate change," de Boer says according to McClatchy newspapers.