The world must aspire to do more to help fight climate change
The Kyoto Protocol, which came into effect in the winter of 2005, was a major global initiative to offset carbon emissions and reduce the impacts of Global Warming. However, despite its ambitions, the United States, one of the world’s biggest contributors to CO2 emissions, failed to commit to it treaty and the treaty feel short of its key aims. The protocol’s aim was to deduct carbon emissions by 5.2c in industrialised countries, which would help to restrict the level of environmental damage caused as a result of greenhouse gases. The Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012 and is in need of a replacement that will produce bigger, bolder ambitions to prevent Global Warming from becoming an irreversible catastrophe. The Copenhagen climate change summit, which took place in December 2009, was a unique opportunity for world countries to secure an agreement and work together to decrease CO2 emissions and was attended by everybody from politicians to emergency fuel suppliers. Unfortunately, the summit was widely regarded as a major failure and was a serious setback, as no formal resolution had been agreed. It would have initiated a resolution which would have reduced emissions to a specific figure by the year 2050, enabling all countries to commit an agreement.
Director of Friends of the Earth Europe, Magda Stoczkiewicz, has reiterated his concerns surrounding Global Warming and climate change. She says that all countries must play a role in helping to tackle the effects of greenhouse emissions and has been quoted as saying that all governments must recognise that man is responsible for climate change and that the crisis is as much an energy problem as it is an environmental one. She describes how the target of a 20 percent reduction in CO2 emissions in the EU by 2020 is completely inadequate and how tougher, more ambitious targets must be made if countries are to prevent the potentially devastating impacts of climate change from arising in the future.