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climate change & sustainabilit y
of greenhouse gases - the United States
and China reached an agreement to
co-operate in a number of key areas
including developing more fuel engines
for large trucks, energy efficient building
and smarter electricity grids.
…for example
Germany generated
a record 23.9
Gigawatts (GW)
of electricity from
solar, enough to
power 2.3 million
homes
They have also pledged to work
more closely on replacements for
hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) - while
ozone-layer friendly these substances
have a huge potential for aggravating
climate change if taken up widely
as replacements in for example air
conditioning systems.
All members of the G8 Group of nations
plus many G20 countries have launched
with UNEP the Climate and Clean Air
Coalition. Its aim is to phase down
the so-called short-lived pollutants
including HFCs, black carbon from diesel
emissions and sources such as the oil,
gas and brick-making industries and
methane from landfills.
These pollutants not only contribute to
global warming but have been shown to
damage human health and crop yields.
Action to tackle them could make a rapid
impact on the melting of ice caps and
glaciers. St. Petersburg could provide an
opportunity for Russia to formalise its
membership of this coalition.
There are other low hanging fruits:
UNEP along with the Food and
Agricultural Organisation of the UN
recently launched the ‘Think.Eat.Save,
Reduce Your Foodprint’ campaign to
combat the extraordinary fact that
at least one-third of food produced
throughout the world - 1.3 billion tonnes
- is lost or wasted.
This is an ethical and will be increasingly
an economic issue, but it is also a climate
change challenge: if food waste and
loss was a country it would be the third
largest emitter of greenhouse gases.
The opportunities for combating
climate change and realising a new,
universal agreement by 2015 under the
UN Framework Convention on Climate
Change by 2015 are manifest - the final
key to unlocking a low carbon, resource
efficient Green Economy will be finance.
These pollutants
not only contribute
to global warming
but have been
shown to damage
human health and
crop yields
…at least one-third
of food produced
throughout the
world - 1.3 billion
tonnes - is lost
or wasted
Over the short term action to, for
example phase down and out the
estimated $600 billion worth of fossil
fuel subsidies and divert this into the
UN’s Green Climate Fund could pump
prime action while cutting annual C0 2
emissions by an estimated 13%.
Indeed the real support for fossil fuels
may be well over $1 trillion a year
according to the International Monetary
Fund when externalities are factored in
from the health impacts of air pollution
to damage linked to climate change.
A new indicator of wealth, which
governments and experts have been
working on since the Rio+20 Summit
last year, bring the invisibility of these
‘externalities’ into the visible spectrum
of national accounts of profit and loss.
Backed by more systematic and
transparent corporate sustainability
reporting this could assist institutional
investors - like pension funds and
insurance companies - with global assets
of more than $70 trillion, invest in low
carbon infrastructure and more resource
efficient companies who are looking to
the future not the past.