UN’s Ban says climate clock ‘ticking’
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TIME is running out to avert “a climate catastrophe,” United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon warned yesterday as ministers opened a frenetic week of talks in Paris to forge an accord to brake global warming.
Scientists predict Earth will become increasingly hostile for mankind as it warms, with disastrous storms, floods and droughts, and rising sea levels that will consume islands and eat away at populated coasts.
Four laborious years in the making, the envisaged post-2020 Paris accord will revolutionize the world’s energy industry, replacing coal, oil and gas with cleaner sources that do not emit heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
“The clock is ticking toward a climate catastrophe,” the UN secretary general told policy-makers gathered in Paris.
“The world is expecting more from you than half-measures and incremental approaches. It is calling for a transformative agreement. Paris must put the world on track for long-term peace, stability and prosperity.”
The talks opened last week with a gathering of 150 world leaders who issued a chorus of warnings about mankind’s fate if planet warming went unchecked.
“The future is one that we have the power to change right here, right now,” said United States President Barack Obama.
Negotiators spent the rest of the week trying to address the competing national interests.
While no major arguments were resolved, negotiators did meet a deadline to produce a draft 48-page blueprint that agrees on the need for urgent action.
Ban urged policy-makers to be ambitious, pressing them to agree to five-year reviews of the deal, starting even before it comes into effect in 2020.
The goal would be to strengthen greenhouse gas-cutting commitments to ensure humanity is on track to limit warming of the planet to less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-Industrial Revolution levels.
“Current ambition must be the floor, not the ceiling for our common efforts,” Ban said.
The head of the UN’s panel of climate experts rammed home the message of urgency.
“The climate is already changing and we know it is due to human activity,” said Hoesung Lee, newly appointed chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“By the end of this year we may already have reached the temperature increase of 1 degree.”
One of the big disputes is over a demand by poor and vulnerable nations to enshrine the target of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees or less, which until now has been an alternative and tougher goal. Major polluters like the US and China are content with aiming for 2 degrees, which would ease the cost of moving away from high-carbon fossil fuels.
“Any further temperature increase beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius will spell the total demise of Tuvalu,” said its Prime Minister Enele Sosene Sopoaga yesterday.
Another potential deal-blocker centers on demands by developing nations for hundreds of billions of dollars to pay for shifting to renewable energy and cope with the impacts of climate change.
“Climate funding is the glue that will make the Paris agreement stick,” said Celine Charveriat, Oxfam’s head of advocacy, .
“It will be the difference between a minimalist agreement and one that starts to deliver for the world’s poorest people.”
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