Tougher targets for the rich: Garnaut

Australian
Thursday 21/2/2008 Page: 6

AUSTRALIA may need to accept much deeper cuts in greenhouse emissions to compensate for developing countries such as China and India in a global climate deal, Labor's main climate change adviser says. Professor Ross Garnaut said he would suggest the future allocation of greenhouse emissions be distributed globally on a per capita basis when he provides his interim report to state premiers today, in advance of the final report from his climate policy review due in September.

This would significantly favour countries such as China and India at the expense of relatively small countries such as Australia with big per capita emissions. Professor Garnaut said it was the only way to get developing countries to agree on targets. In a speech to an international solar conference in Adelaide yesterday, Professor Garnaut warned there was "little prospect" that the international agreement hammered out in Bali in December was enough to address the risk of dangerous climate change.

In his most controversial speech yet, he said the global negotiations on a post-Kyoto deal must include targets on major developing as well as developed countries or the parties must "abandon hope of achieving climate stabilisation at moderate levels." "At the multilateral level, the world should instead aim for a post-Kyoto agreement in which all major emitters, developed and developing, are subject to emissions budgets," Professor Garnaut said.

He said Australia could encourage greater ambition in the current negotiations, due to be completed at the end of next year, and set up a regional emissions trading bloc with South Pacific nations, Papua New Guinea and possibly Indonesia. Indonesia and PNG have expressed co-operation with Australia on climate policy and Professor Garnaut said they could reach targets and deliver substantial emissions reductions quickly and easily through avoided deforestation, technology transfer and development of low-cost renewable energy.

This would require national emissions budgets for all countries to drive international permit trading which, if managed carefully, could accelerate development in poorer countries. "Developing countries will have to see it is as equitable that all countries have limits on their emissions, but that richer countries have much more stringent limits," he said. Climate Institute Australia policy director Erwin Jackson said the speech was "encouraging" in recognising it was in Australia's interests to have an ambitious global emissions regime.