Compounding social and economic impacts - Four Degrees of Global Warming - page 139

First, leaders who are committed to avoidance of extreme global warming need
to establish a group of experts to define an allocation of emissions reduction
responses that adds up to a global mitigation solution, and which is widely
accepted as distributing responsibilities equitably across countries. Within the
framework of concerted unilateral mitigation, the resulting framework would
guide voluntary national decisions.
Second, all substantial countries, developed and developing, would need to
build on unexpectedly rapid and economically low-cost reductions in emissions
so far by tightening 2020 targets. Countries and regions which have stronger
conditional alongside their unconditional targets, like the European Union and
Australia, would activate conditional targets. Others would review targets in the
light of stronger international action.
Third, all substantial countries would prepare for the Paris Conference of
the Parties to the UNFCCC, in 2015, with a mind to committing to post-2020
reductions in emissions entitlements that add up to the 2°C objective. That
would require acceptance in all substantial countries of reductions in emissions
entitlements towards average per capita levels less than half the average for the
world as a whole today.
This seems difficult because it is difficult. But the new framework of concerted
unilateral mitigation and the marked changes in emissions trajectories so far
within that framework suggest that it is possible. Hard as it may be, effective
mitigation to avoid extreme climate change will be less difficult and more
feasible than attempts to plan for adaptation to a Four Degree World.
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