As disasters surge, nations must slash emissions faster, climate experts urge

by Alex Whiting | @AlexWhi | Thomson Reuters Foundation
Sunday, 5 November 2017 08:36 GMT

A protester wearing a mask of U.S. President Donald Trump stand along with other protesters dressed as polar bears during a demonstration under the banner "Protect the climate - stop coal" two days before the start of the COP 23 UN Climate Change Conference hosted by Fiji but held in Bonn, Germany November 4, 2017. REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay

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As U.N. climate negotiations start Monday in Bonn, disasters show the need for a hike in ambition, experts say

By Alex Whiting

BONN, Nov 5 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - With hurricanes, floods and other impacts of climate change becoming increasingly destructive, countries urgently need to step up their ambitions to cut emissions if they are to keep global warming within safe limits, experts said ahead of U.N. climate talks starting on Monday.



Nicholas Nuttall, spokesman for the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, said the national plans delivered in advance of Paris, "were well known at the time to fall short of the Paris Agreement's long-term goals".



"That will, if followed, eventually get the world on track to the goals and the aim of climate neutrality in the second half of the century," Nuttall said.

"The U.N. climate conference in Bonn ... needs to be a launch pad to that next ambition moment," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.


In the effort to reduce emissions and stave off worsening impacts, "we're in a race against time," Angel Gurria, secretary-general of the OECD, last week.

"We have to make it stick that it's good business to protect the environment but also that it's good policy," he said.


But time is short, with global emissions of climate changing gases needing to peak by 2020 - just three years away - in order to keep warming to relatively safe levels, according to the World Resources Institute.

Camilla Born, a senior policy adviser for E3G, a London-based climate think tank said: "We are going to have to show increased ambition by 2020 if we're going to really get on track to delivering those long-term goals."

"This is a broader and deeper task than we've ever seen before. This isn't just a conversation about raising targets. This is about structuring our economies differently.

"We are moving in that direction, but we need to move there much faster," Born told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"It's not a done deal but we've got lots of ingredients to make that happen," she said.




But more than $4 trillion is needed for developing countries to implement their plans, according to the Least Developed Countries (LDC) Group which represents the world's poorest 47 countries.

"LDCs and other developing countries cannot take ambitious action to address climate change or protect themselves against its impacts unless all countries fulfil and outdo the pledges they have made," said Gebru Jember Endalew, the Ethiopian chair of the group.

"(We) face the unique and unprecedented challenge of lifting our people out of poverty and achieving sustainable development without relying on fossil fuels," he said.


Not finding it will be "a serious barrier to ambitious climate action", he said.


With such impacts following a global temperature rise of just 1.2 degrees Celsius, many poorer nations and organisations representing the world's vulnerable are pushing hard to keep temperature rises to not just well below 2 degrees but to a more ambitious 1.5 degrees Celsius.

A global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees is "a critical threshold which can still prevent many of the worst impacts on poor populations", said Sven Harmeling of CARE International.

The Bonn talks "must provide a clear way forward so that countries come back with more ambitious plans to cut emissions", said Harmeling, who is head of CARE's delegation to the talks. (Reporting by Alex Whiting @Alexwhi, additional reporting by Anna Pujol-Mazzini, Editing by Laurie Goering.; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, climate change, resilience, women's rights, trafficking and property rights. Visit

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