UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Chris Huhne, with his counterparts in France and Germany, Jean-Louis Borloo and Dr Norbert Röttgen, last Thursday published a statement calling on Europe to increase its greenhouse gas reduction target to 30% cuts by 2020. The climate ministers' statement also appeared in the Financial Times.
The RSPB welcomes this call to action, but warns that Governments must go further if dangerous climate change is to be avoided.
RSPB Climate Policy Officer Melanie Coath, who's been tracking the international negotiations closely, explains why:
"When the EU negotiators went to Copenhagen they made no secret of their position. Europe had already committed to reducing its emissions by 20% by 2020 and would increase that to 30% if a global agreement was reached.
Copenhagen failed to live up to expectations, narrowly escaping complete crash only by salvaging a loose accord that the major parties signed up to. As the EU never got to play its 30% card, the 20% target has remained, holding back green investment and threatening to undermine the EU's position as a climate change leader.
Now, Chris Huhne has led a call to Europe to increase the target unilaterally.
This is a welcome move, but it doesn't go far enough. Politics needs to keep up with the science.
The IPCC are clear: if you want to avoid dangerous levels of climate change, developed countries need to cut emissions by 25-40% by 2020 from 1990 levels to stay in a temperature range of 2.1-2.4 degrees. To stand a good chance of staying below two degrees, you need a reduction of more than 40% on average across all developed countries.
2oC is not just an arbitrary number; it's where climate change impacts get really dangerous across the world. According to the IPPC it means that 95% of the Great Barrier reef is lost and 37% of the Arctic tundra. Overall we could be looking at loosing 20 to 30% of species globally. And it would be a human tragedy too, causing 55 million more Africans to go hungry and up to 3 million more people to suffer an increased risk of coastal flooding.
This means Europe needs to be considering a 40% target by 2020, and this Government, which aspires to be the greenest Government ever, needs to make this happen."
One of the best ways for the UK to reduce its emissions without damaging valuable wildlife habitats by ill-considered "green energy" schemes is, of course, to renew the current generation of ageing nuclear power stations. It will be interesting to see how the anti-nuclear Mr Huhne progresses this government policy.