While Obama and Hu are meeting at a critical time in London,the first in a series of United Nations climate negotiations began in Bonn this week, which culminate with the Climate Summit in Copenhagen in December where negotiators will agree the next stage of the Kyoto Protocol.
“To save the climate, we need strong leadership from Obama and Hu. We need them to take personal responsibility and agree to attend the Copenhagen Climate Summit and work with world leaders to come up with a strong binding treaty to fight climate change,” said Karen Sack, Greenpeace International Political Director.
“A jointUS/China commitment to avert runaway climate change, including securing the necessary funding and a call to other world leaders to join them, could be the critical step that breaks the stalemate and leads to a legacy of climate protection,” she stressed.
Changes in the environment are already being witnessed,including the rapid melting of the Arctic summer sea ice, making it clear that the threat of catastrophe is far more immediate than anyone imagined.
Even though both countries are already acting on renewable energy, more urgently needs to be done. China needs to work towards a larger renewable energy target of 30% by 2020 to help move it away from coal, the most climate-changing fossil fuel.
The US must commit the substantial funding necessary to help developing nations leap-frog dirty energy and usher in a sustainable clean energy future. And it must lead the way to that future by committing to meaningful emission reductions at home in line with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s findings that to have a chance of averting climate disaster we must keep global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius.
If catastrophic climate change is to be averted, leaders need to agree at Copenhagen that developed countries, as a group, must agree to cut emissions by 40% by 2020. And developing countries must also take ambitious action to ensure global emissions not only peak by 2015, but fall to as close to zero as possible by mid-century. To do this, along with ending deforestation and adapting to the already inevitable climate impacts, developing countries will need financial support from the developed world. This figure needs to be in the region of US$140 billion (€110bn) a year.
Other contacts: Beth Herzfeld, Greenpeace International Press Office (in London), +44 (0) 7717 802 891Karen Sack, Greenpeace International Political Director (in Washington, DC), + 1 202 415 5403Sze Pang Cheung, Greenpeace China Campaign Interim Director (in Beijing), +86 139 1146 0884