BERLIN, Oct. 6 (UPI) -- Worldwide pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are falling far short of what's needed to avoid catastrophic climate change, environmental group WWF warned Wednesday, urging negotiators meeting in China to reverse that trend.
Under current policy settings, emissions could be "up to nearly one-third more in 2020 than the trend needed to avoid" dangerous climate change, WWF said in a report compiled based on its forecasts and latest national reduction pledges.
WWF says the world needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to a yearly output of 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2020 to limit the warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. Instead, nations are on track to emit up to 53.6 billion tons of CO2 per year.
"It's clear that some countries are facing up to the necessary transformations of their economies but other countries have failed to endorse this new trend speedily and are risking the safety and prosperity of all," Gordon Shepherd, the head of WWF's Global Climate Initiative, said in a statement.
He added that negotiators from 177 nations meeting until Saturday for U.N.-mandated climate talks in Tianjin, China, should work to "see at least some indications of this trend changing."
Global climate negotiations have been deadlocked since the failed meeting in Copenhagen late last year, when leaders jetting to Denmark couldn't agree on concrete emissions reduction targets or a way to measure them.
The summit culminated in the publication of the so-called Copenhagen Accord, a non-binding declaration agreed between the United States, China, Brazil and South Africa after larger negotiations had broken down.
Developing nations have since resisted a legally binding treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which runs out in 2012, because they claim rich nations that have benefited from emitting during the past decades should shoulder more of the burden. Industrialized countries argue the developing nations need to commit to concrete reduction targets to enable a global effort.
The European Commission this year backtracked on a plan to unilaterally boost the bloc's greenhouse gas emissions reduction target from 20 percent to 30 percent -- likely also because other nations, including China and the United States, the world's top two emitters, haven't committed to similarly ambitious targets.
The Tianjin talks, the final meeting before a major U.N. summit this December in Cancun, Mexico, have focused on financial pledges for climate mitigation schemes instead of concrete emissions reduction targets that remain too controversial to be agreed upon.
Officials from climate heavyweights, including the United States and the European Union, have in the past weeks suggested they might seek channels outside the U.N. process to tackle climate change.
Few observers expect a binding agreement to emerge from the Cancun meeting. Susanne Droege, climate expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, a Berlin think tank, revealed that not even a workable negotiation text has been drafted yet.
"Ninety percent of the time, negotiators are locked in procedural talks and that can be very frustrating," Droege told United Press International in a telephone interview Wednesday. "Cancun will be all about not promising too much."
