Copenhagen Climate Congress Synthesis Report
August 10, 2009 10:20PM
The key messages (abridged) from the synthesis report (pdf) of the March 2009 Copenhagen climate congress, organised by the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU):
Climatic trends
With unabated emissions, many trends in climate will likely accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts.
Social and environmental disruption
Recent observations show that societies and ecosystems are highly vulnerable to even modest levels of climate change, with poor nations and communities, ecosystem services and biodiversity particularly at risk.
Long-term strategy: Global targets and timetables
Setting a credible long-term price for carbon and the adoption of policies that promote energy efficiency and low-carbon technologies are central to effective mitigation.
Equity dimensions
Tackling climate change should be seen as integral to the broader goals of enhancing socioeconomic development and equity throughout the world.
Inaction is inexcusable
A wide range of benefits will flow from a concerted effort to achieve effective and rapid adaptation and mitigation. These include job growth in the sustainable energy sector; reductions in the health, social, economic and environmental costs of climate change; and the repair of ecosystems and revitalisation of ecosystem services.
Meting the challenge
If the societal transformation required to meet the climate change challenge is to be achieved, then a number of significant constraints must be overcome and critical opportunities seized. These include reducing inertia in social and economic systems; building on a growing public desire for governments to act on climate change; reducing activities that increase greenhouse gas emissions and reduce resilience (e.g. subsidies); and enabling the shifts from ineffective governance and weak institutions to innovative leadership in government, the private sector and civil society.
In "What Really Happened at Copenhagen?" Tyndall Center founding director Mike Hulme comments on the Congress:
[W]hat exactly is the ‘action’ the conference statement is calling for? Are these messages expressing the findings of science or are they expressing political opinions? I have no problem with scientists offering clear political messages as long as they are clearly recognized as such. And the conference chair herself, Professor Katherine Richardson, has described the messages as politically-motivated. All well and good.
But then we need to be clear about what authority these political messages carry. They carry the authority of the people who drafted them — and no more. Not the authority of the 2,500 expert researchers gathered at the conference. And certainly not the authority of collective global science.
The lines between and among science and politics become less clear. The report does feature an impressive group of contributing authors - even if, as Hulme insists, they cannot speak for their gathered colleagues.
One portion of the report that caught my eye, by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber and Veronika Huber of the Potsdam Institute, discusses land use strategies:
Keeping global warming below 2°C will require all our ingenuity. ... In particular, the current planetary land-use pattern may have to change fundamentally, as it is the sub-optimal result of erratic historical processes that were blind to global sustainability considerations. ...
Science needs to demonstrate (i) what an “optimal” land-use pattern might look like; (ii) that this pattern would warrant the generation of sufficient quantities of the desired functions and resources; and (iii) which sociopolitical strategies can realise the envisioned transformation in good time. The international research community is just beginning to address such issues, yet certain insights concerning the first two aspects are already available.
For instance, the German Global Change Advisory Council (WBGU) has recently published various reports that identify those areas on Earth that should be dedicated to biodiversity support, biomass production, and renewable energy harvesting, respectively. One important conclusion is that the afforestation of degraded land can tap a sustainable bioenergy potential of around 100 Exajoules.
Analyses led by the Potsdam Institute also indicate that 12 billion people with 1995 dietary habits could be nourished on less than one third of the present agricultural area – if the best sites were used for the most appropriate crops and if world food trade would operate undistorted by protectionism. This bold approach would only become feasible, however, if the prime locations would be reclaimed/reserved for agriculture as part of a long-term global deal – in the same way as the tropical rainforests hopefully will be earmarked for conservation as part of the global commons.
In a plenary presentation at the congress, Schellnhuber compared climate risks to a game of Russian roulette:
Who in the room knows what Russian roulette is? Please raise your arm. Who has ever played Russian roulette? Raise your arm.
As a matter of fact, we all do. … Russian roulette means you have a 5/6 chance to survive. It actually turns out that you need an 80% reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, relative to 1990 [in order to have a 5/6 chance of limiting human-influenced, global climate warming to 2ºC].
Your thoughts?
