Web Application Allows Easy Analysis of Climate Pledges
December 11th, 2009 by 
The World Research Institute (WRI) released an interactive Web application yesterday at the COP15 conference. The application allows for easy analysis of a country’s emission reduction pledge and all of the latest developed nation pledges have since been fed into the new application by the WRI.
Rob Bradley, International Director of WRI, said “Understanding the levels of ambition of developed country targets, as well as how they compare with one another, is crucial. Hopefully this will help them agree to an ambitious path towards reducing their pollution.”
The image [above] shows a screen shot from the application and illustrates Annex I developed country absolute emission-reduction pledges in 2020 relative to 1990 levels. The red line represents these countries’ aggregated reductions based on their pledges (13-18%, if LULUCF emissions are included in baseline).
The IPCC suggests that stabilizing atmospheric concentrations to 450 parts per million of CO2 will require these countries to reduce emissions 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020.
The ability to compare pledges is seen as a vital element of ensuring a fair global agreement.
This new analysis tools makes comparison of pledges possible and allows for factors like the level of effort taken domestically versus via international offsets, abatement costs and historical responsibility to be examined.
Also, anyone can play online with the pledge numbers, choose different assumptions, and compare commitments of countries. This allows for people to learn how far current pledges go towards addressing the urgent problem of climate change.
For more information on the new web analysis visit the WRI website .
Article by Kate R., appearing courtesy of Celsias
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Tags:  analysis COP15 conference country emission emission reduction pledge web application WRI | [ Permalink ] |
Impressive tool, but I would love to see it with changes over time so that progress could be tracked.