The European Union (EU)’s delegation at the climate change conference in Lima has argued that legally binding cuts applying to all countries are necessary and should be adopted by 2015 and entered into force by 2020.
“The EU is of the mind that legally binding mitigation targets are the only way to provide the necessary long-term signal, the necessary confidence to the investors … and provide credibility in the low carbon transition worldwide,” said Elina Bardram, head of the EU delegation at the conference, which opened on Monday.
“We’re not convinced that an alternative approach could provide the same signals that would be sufficient to deliver the global momentum,” Bardram told the Guardian, adding the EU would seek to take a leadership role in negotiations for an agreement which would be “owned by all parties.”
It is the first time an EU official has publicly gone on the record on legally binding targets, stating the EU’s negotiating position at the Lima conference, which is intended to deliver the first draft of an accord to cut carbon emissions and stave off dangerous climate change. The accord is expected to be signed at a UN conference in Paris next year.
The EU appears to have toughened its stance faced with major nations which claim they could not impose economy wide targets. Bardram hinted that such positions could stall the negotiating process in the lead-up to the Paris meeting.
“We don’t want to get to Paris and realise that the targets and the contributions did not add up to what we needed,” Bardram told the Guardian, adding that the EU wanted the 2015 agreement to have “legal force through robust rules, procedures and institutions, to ensure long-term certainty and accountability”.
