Cities are home to half the world’s population and produce around 75% of the world’s GDP and greenhouse gas emissions. By 2050, between 65% and 75% of the world population is projected to be living in cities, with more than 40 million people moving to cities each year. That’s around 3.5 billion people now, rising to 6.5 billion by 2050; a huge and singular event in human history.
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As we get closer to the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP) in Paris in November and December, the thought pieces, blogs, and public lectures have been piling up. What will success at COP21 look like? What will it mean for global climate efforts? What if it is a failure? But is all this time, energy, and media scrutiny misplaced? As someone who has been working in the Australian climate change adaptation space for the past four years, I believe so.
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IN less than a month, delegates from more than 190 countries will convene in Paris to finalize a sweeping agreement intended to constrain human influence on the climate. But any post-meeting celebration will be tempered by two sobering scientific realities that will weaken the effectiveness of even the most ambitious emissions reduction plans that are being discussed.
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The President and CEO of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) Peter Bakker, has launched a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers showing that the ambitions set out in WBCSD’s Low Carbon Technology Partnerships initiative could deliver 65% of all the carbon emission reductions needed to meet the UN target of keeping global warming to under 2°C. However, for this target to be met, the right policy framework needs to be created by governments around the world.
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Working basis
Five meticulous days to work on the shortened text of 20 pages published on 5 October 2015 by the ADP* Co-Chairs, Ahmed Djoghlaf (Algeria) and Daniel Reifsnyder (United States). The aim of this last negotiating session is to improve the text, identify compromises, decide on options and set out the parameters of an ambitious agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
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Bonn, 5 October 2015 – Work towards a new universal climate change agreement was today strengthened through the issuance of the first comprehensive draft of the agreement. The Co-Chairs of the Ad hoc working group on the Durban platform (ADP), the body tasked with negotiating the agreement, prepared the draft, which contains the basis for negotiation of the draft Paris climate package. In addition to the agreement, the package contains a draft of the decision that will operationalize the agreement from 2020 and a draft decision on pre-2020 ambition.
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