Sharing developed countries' post-2012 greenhouse gas emission reductions based on comparable efforts

Comparable effort reductions

EU Heads of State and Government agreed in March 2007 that the EU will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions with 30%, below 1990 levels, by 2020, within an international post-2012 climate agreement, provided that other developed (Annex I) countries commit to comparable reductions. Within this context, this report calculates comparable reduction efforts according to fundamentally different effort-sharing approaches for the individual Annex I countries. We compared the results to the emission reduction pledged by these countries.

Update earlier study

This report updates our earlier study on comparable effort reductions. The major updates include an updated baseline scenario, including the impact of the economic crisis, and two alternative approaches, that is, multi-criteria formula based on the European Commission and equal marginal costs plus income.

Important elements for determining the stringency of targets

The results from the analyses indicate that different elements are important for the individual countries when determining the stringency of targets:

1. the effort-sharing approaches are very important for countries different from the average (e.g. Canada, Russia);
2. the starting point for the calculations, for example, from 2006, 2007, 2008, or the Kyoto target, is very important for countries with increased emissions (e.g. the United States, Canada) or countries with decreased emissions (e.g. Russia, the Ukraine);
3. rules on land use are very important for countries with large forests.

Are current pledges sufficient ?

Finally, current pledges are not sufficient to reach an aggregated reduction by the Annex I countries of 25 to 40% below 1990 levels, by 2020. But the stringency of the individual countries’ pledges differs substantially, compared to the results from the effort-sharing approaches. For the EU, only the more ambitious pledge would be just in line with the comparable effort reduction range. For the United States, the current version of the discussed national legislation is less ambitious than the calculated reduction range.