Germany Takes Lead in Emission Reductions & Protecting Wildlife

Germany will stick to a more ambitious goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2020 even though the UN climate conference in Copenhagen fell short of expectations, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged industrialised and emerging countries to invest more in protecting wildlife, saying the UN should create a body to refine scientific arguments for saving animal and plant species.

Erik Kirschbaum for Reuters World Environment News (12 January 2010):

BERLIN – Germany will stick to a more ambitious goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2020 even though the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen fell short of expectations, a government adviser said on Monday.

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said it was unclear if the European Union as a whole would pursue a 30 percent target when it submits its plan to the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat by January 31.

Germany had hoped that its offer to raise its 2020 target from 30 to 40 percent, combined with an EU offer to raise its goal from 20 to 30 percent if other nations pledged substantial cuts, would spur a deal on worldwide reductions in Copenhagen.

The Copenhagen accord set a goal of limiting global warming to a maximum 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times. But it failed to say how this would be achieved.

“Germany has a firm target that the government has even spelled out in its coalition agreement to cut its emissions by 40 percent,” Schellnhuber told a news conference. “That’s unconditional. Germany will continue to be a driving force.”

Germany is the world’s sixth largest emitter. Some industry groups have urged Berlin to drop ambitious emissions targets, saying they could jeopardise jobs. Germany has created hundreds of thousands of green tech jobs in the last decade.

Schellnhuber said it was hard to tell how the EU would react to the bare-minimum Copenhagen result in which delegates “noted” an accord struck by the United States, China and emerging powers that fell far short of the conference’s original goals.

“But if others hesitate, Germany will have the chance to make its economy more fit for the future,” said the adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the EU on climate change.

Schellnhuber, whose PIK institute calculated the Copenhagen accord will lead to a 3.5-degree rise in global temperatures, said he was optimistic the process would move forward in 2010.

An interim conference in June in Bonn could make progress and create momentum for a U.N. agreement in Mexico in November.

“The game isn’t over yet,” Schellnhuber said. “The dice haven’t fallen yet. We still have the chance in the multilateral system to reach a worthwhile agreement.”

At another climate meeting in Berlin on Monday, Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the U.N. Environment Program, said the failure to reach a deal in Copenhagen would cost economies around the world billions of dollars.

“Copenhagen was a setback. There was no deal. But maybe we can use the shock from that to overcome the hurdles in front of us,” he said.

Madeline Chambers for Reuters World Environment News (12 January 2010):

BERLIN – German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged industrialized and emerging countries to invest more in protecting wildlife and said the U.N. should create a body to refine scientific arguments for saving animal and plant species.

Researchers say preserving nature is crucial to the fight against climate change and warn that human activity is speeding up extinctions. They also argue that peoples’ livelihoods depend on natural assets worth trillions of dollars.

Extinction rates run at 1,000 times their natural pace due to human activity, research shows. Three species vanish per hour, according to U.N. figures.

“The question of preserving biological diversity is on the same scale as climate protection,” Merkel said Monday at an event to launch the United Nations’ Year of Biodiversity.

“We need a sea change. Here, now, immediately — not some time in the future,” she said. “This year has to be used to relaunch this effort.” Germany is chair of the U.N. Convention on Biodiversity and hands over to Japan later in the year.

Merkel said countries should invest more money in protecting species and create a network of wildlife protection areas.

She also suggested setting up a new body to deal with the science of biodiversity, similar to the U.N.’s panel of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“It would be sensible to have an interface between the politics and the science to integrate knowledge, like the IPCC does with climate change,” she said, adding such a body could help drive forward the political work.

Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the U.N. Environment Program, agreed, saying the time had come to do something comparable to the IPCC on the subject of biodiversity.

Up to a fifth of plant and animal species risk extinction, according to experts, and nations have missed a goal set by the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) in 2002 to significantly slow the loss of biodiversity by 2010.

Ahmed Djoghlaf, CBD Executive Secretary, said it was essential to set new targets this year.

“We have established a target and missed it… we have to learn the lesson to ensure that in 2020, we will not say ‘we have missed the target’.”

“The strategy must be not only about setting a target but about implementation, monitoring and evaluation and integrating targets into national plans,” said Djoghlaf.

Source:  www.planetark.org