Speech by Commissioner Dimas - Climate Change: The Urgency of the Problem

Summary: May 31, 2005: Stavros Dimas, Member of the European Commission, responsible for Environment, Climate Change: The Urgency of the Problem, Opening debate Green Week (Brussels)

Climate Change: The Urgency of the Problem

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I would like to welcome you to Green Week 2005, which focuses on climate change this year. I would also like to thank Mr Klum and Mr Peck for their excellent presentations - giving a very clear and lively picture of how real the threat of climate change is.

Politically, 2005 is an important year for the fight against climate change: in February, the Kyoto Protocol entered into force. One month earlier, EU companies started trading allowances through the EU emission trading scheme - the biggest ever trading scheme both in economic and environmental terms. Crucially, this year has also witnessed the start of the dialogue about the next phase of climate change policy, post 2012. The EU will maintain its leadership role in this context. We are talking to other countries and building support for a post-2012 regime. Let me also mention Prime Minister Blair's decision to make climate change a priority of the UK's G8 Presidency.

These political activities are founded on the belief that climate change is one of the greatest threats that we are facing today - not just an environmental threat, but a threat to our economies, our way of life, perhaps even our security and safety.

The need to act

There is no doubt that climate change is happening. Also, I believe we can say beyond reasonable doubt that human activities contribute to climate change - that our growing emissions of greenhouse gases have changed the composition of the Earth's atmosphere and that this is having an impact on our climate.

There are plenty of warnings - we all saw and heard Mr Peck's presentation, which summarises the current knowledge and scientific evidence.

It would be irresponsible to ignore them. As decision-makers, we have the duty to take them seriously and to do what we can to limit climate change to levels we can cope with. Like me, I think there are many citizens that are beginning to wonder what the world will look like when our children grow up.

Let me mention some of the risks:

Climate change causes extreme weather events, such as storms, floods, droughts and heat waves. They are costly, cause human suffering, and drive up insurance costs. We should all remember the hot summer of 2003 during which more than 20,000 people in the EU died prematurely from a combination of heat stress and increased air pollution. There were large-scale forest fires in southern Europe. European farmers lost over € 10 billion in income. Such heat waves could occur every second year after 2071 if we don't mitigate climate change.

Temperature increases of 2.5° Celsius and more above pre-industrial levels would severely aggravate the water situation in countries where water is already scarce. As a result, an additional 2 to 3 billion people might suffer from water stress. Similarly, an additional 50 million could find themselves at the risk of hunger due to declining food production.

70 million of the EU's 455 million citizens live at or near the coast. Many derive their livelihoods from activities related to the sea, such as tourism and fishing. Rising sea levels and equally inland waters threaten the homes and livelihoods of many people. It is also our duty to care for other coastal dwellers in the world, who will be faced with very much the same problems.

Low-lying areas and islands - such as the Maldives, the Nile Delta in Egypt, Bangladesh - even face the threat of being flooded and submerged by the sea.

More than 1,000 studies today document climate change effects on ecosystems. Some species are declining in numbers due to the disappearance of food sources, others are moving to regions where the climate is more suitable for them, and habitats are shifting towards where it is cooler. In the long-term, this will jeopardise the delivery of the goods and services from biodiversity that we depend on, such as food, medicines, climate moderation, water purification, soil stability.

I could go on listing many more impacts and risks of climate change. They all show that climate change will have far-reaching effects that will disrupt our societies and way of life.

EU climate change policies:

The EU has made the fight against climate change one of its major policies and is leading global efforts aimed at combating climate change. It was instrumental in bringing the Kyoto Protocol into force in February. Its emission reduction targets are ambitious. More than five years ago, in March 2000, the Commission launched the European Climate Change Programme, ECCP for short, under which 42 measures have been identified that will allow the EU to reach its Kyoto target cost-effectively. Nearly all the measures have been implemented.

Among them is the EU's company-level Emissions Trading Scheme, which successfully kicked off on 1 January 2005. Other measures seek, for example, to improve energy efficiency, expand renewable energy, advance combined heat and power generation, regulate fluorinated greenhouse gases, reduce CO2 emissions from cars and methane emissions from landfills, and strengthen R&D into solutions and technologies of tomorrow and their deployment.

Looking at our efforts to bring down greenhouse gas emissions, we can say that we have made a start. Averaged over the latest five years, EU-15 emissions stand 2.9% below their 1990 levels.

But we know that far more needs to be done. Only with additional policies and measures will it be possible to reach the collective EU-15 Kyoto target: a reduction by 8%. Therefore the Commission intends to launch a new phase of the ECCP programme and identify further measures to reduce emissions. I am looking forward to discussing with you some of the key measures under the new ECCP programme over the coming days.

Post 2012:

During Green Week, we will also look at what needs to be done in the future to get climate change under control - post 2012, after the expiry of the Kyoto targets. This is the most burning issue in the current climate change debate.

Earlier this year, the Commission put out a paper outlining basic elements a future climate change regime should include:

We believe that there must be broad participation in the reduction effort - by all major emitters, including developing countries. The EU will continue to play a leadership role in the multilateral approach to climate change, but wider participation based on the principle of 'common but differentiated responsibilities' is urgently required.

We need to include more policy areas: the scope of action must be widened to cover all greenhouse gases and all sectors, notably aviation, maritime transport and deforestation.

The continued use of market-based instruments is important to keep compliance costs low. This means that the successful flexible Kyoto mechanisms should be maintained.

Another key area on which we need to focus is innovation: a determined push for new climate-friendly technologies is indispensable to provide us with better technologies today and the solutions for tomorrow.

Lastly, since a certain degree of climate change is inevitable, we need to step up efforts to develop adaptation policies.

The EU also remains committed to reduction targets. Any future climate change regime will include such targets - they have proven to be a very useful tool by providing clear guidance to decision makers.

However, the timing for proposing such targets is very important. The exact timing should depend on the progress we make in negotiations on the future climate change regime. Agreeing on future regime must be a collaborative effort, so we first want to hear what our partners have to say and explore options, before we formulate more concrete ideas.

UNFCCC seminar of government experts:

We had an opportunity to do this at a seminar of government experts, which took place in Bonn under the umbrella of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change two weeks ago. This seminar was an important first step to move the international policy agenda into the direction of future action.

The seminar helped improve mutual understanding of the concerns and views of the 189 Parties to the Convention. It confirmed the urgent need felt by most Parties to further strengthen international action to tackle climate change and its adverse effects, both in the short and in the long term.

As I mentioned before, a successful fight against climate change requires the participation of all major emitters, including developing countries. We do not think that even the booming economies among them can, or indeed should, take on the same commitments as industrialised countries. Their per-capita emissions and income levels are still a fraction of ours. But we could think about a system with different types of participation and objective criteria that determine which commitments apply to the country in question.

There are good reasons for developing countries to join the effort: they are very vulnerable to climate change. During the seminar in Bonn, many representatives of the developing world expressed their eagerness for policies that focus on improving their access to renewable energy and their energy-efficiency, and which foster clean technology.

When it comes to the US - with 20% of the global share the world's largest emitter - I hope it will recognise the need and the value of an international approach to reducing emissions. In April, I was in Washington, as part of the EU Troika, and was encouraged by the willingness of the US administration to discuss climate change issues with the EU. We will now have to see how we move from here - but I have good hope that we can find common ground and achieve concrete results.

Green Week's role:

We should end this year as we started it - with a major political push to the international co-operation on climate change. I thererfore hope the Parties to the UN Climate Change Convention will soon reach agreement to open formal negotiations of a future climate change regime. An opportunity for this step will be the next Conference of the Parties in Montreal in November/December this year.

As I mentioned initially, we are receiving plenty of warnings of what climate change will do to us if we let it go unconstrained. But success depends on coordinated, global action.

Green Week is a great opportunity to reflect about possible architectures of the future climate change regime. This will help us decision-makers find the right answers and live up to our responsibility to provide future generations with a stable climate.

Working on climate change, I am often reminded of the words of the former Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Abba Eban who once said "History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives". On climate change, we are approaching that situation. But there is still time to act.

I wish you and us all inspiring discussions.

Ref: SP05-264EN
EU source: European Commission
UN forum:
Date: 31/5/2005

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