London, 29 January 2010

Nations which pushed for the Copenhagen Accord on climate change last December must heed the 31st January deadline for pledging their targets and details of emission reduction programs, WWF said today.

“Currently, the Copenhagen Accord sets out one agreed goal – keeping the world below the two degrees Celsius danger threshold for global warming,” said Keith Allott, Head of Climate Change at WWF-UK.  “Sunday is the self-imposed deadline for countries to lay out what they are actually going to do to keep the world out of the danger zone. For the great majority of nations, this would imply a considerable increase on their commitments so far.”

“Emissions reductions on the table at Copenhagen were clearly setting us up for a world that would be at least three degrees warmer, even without taking account of several large loopholes which allow dubious emissions reductions claims or double counting of reductions. The impacts of three degrees warming would be devastating for people and nature around the world,” Keith Allott said.

WWF today released The Copenhagen Accord: A Stepping Stone analysing how the world might begin the journey from the political agreement of the Copenhagen Accord to an internationally binding climate treaty in Mexico City in December.

The conservation organisation is calling for targets from developed countries which approach the upper end of a 25-40 per cent range of emissions reductions below 1990 levels, by 2020. Of the targets on the table in Copenhagen, only Norway, which has a 40 per cent reduction target, met this level of ambition.

“We fear that there is still a gross mismatch between the goal of keeping the world out of climate danger and the steps that the developed nations, who did the most to push the Copenhagen Accord forward, are actually prepared to take to achieve this goal,” Allott said.

Last weekend major emerging economies – the BASIC Group of Brazil, South Africa, India and China –  announced that they intended to meet the January 31 deadline by providing more detail on voluntary mitigation programmes under the accord.

“This is a very helpful move from this group of major developing countries. We expect they will announce high levels of ambition and follow up urgently with clear national action plans meet this ambition. It is time the developed world made a similar commitment regarding their emissions reductions targets,” Allott said. “There is a general awareness that the world failed to do what it needed to do in Copenhagen but climate change is not a problem that will go away. The issue will get  ever more costly to tackle, and the impacts ever harder to cope with, the longer we wait to take effective action.”

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