When charts are fun. Really!
Posted on 09. Dec, 2009 by Rosa Kouri in Canada
Comparing Canada’s emissions reductions (using colourful vertical boxes)
A slide shown today demonstrates comparable emissions reductions vs business as usual scenarious and targets.
I’m sitting in the plenary session on the Kyoto protocol, listening to a discussion on the Clean Development Mechanism. Canada’s negotiators are at the front of the room, hanging out by their placard. They haven’t intervened yet, I’ll let you know if they do.
In the meantime, I thought I’d share with you a slide that was brought forward during a session this morning on ‘Annex 1 emissions reductions’ - basically, rich country targets.
This slide shows a breakdown of different reduction scenarios for 12 countries. The point is to compare current pledges by rich countries, and explain how a 30% aggregate emission reduction by Annex 1 parties could be reached, presumably by 2020. The ‘aggregate’ refers to the total emissions reductions when you put all countries’ individual performance together, often working in some flexibility for different countries who have different proportional shares. Basically, the relay team’s time score when everyone tries their hardest, knowing that some runners started in different places.
Let’s focus on Canada. For ease of illustration, I’ve used the most cutting-edge technology to highlight Canada’s section in the graph (circles and shaky arrows ).
As we can see, Canada’s fair ’share’ of an annex 1 aggregate reduction should be 17%. If business continues as usual, the scenario predicts we will be 30% above 1990 levels. Yikes!
The slide also includes current targets, or the range of targets offered by countries who are willing to negotiate given what others commit (imagine that!). We can see the 3% target below 2005 levels, announced by the federal government in 2006. The only other target comparable to that is the United States (while they have a marginally less alarming business-as-usual scenario, the US target is actually quite different given the domestic policy being unrolled, see my comment here). There’s also Australia, but they seem pretty open to compromise.
In fact, the chart shows a lot. Notice that about half these countries have ‘business-as-usual’ scenarios which involve significant increases, while half have already decreased emissions enough that they’ll be below current levels without any further commitments. I think that’s impressive.
It’s amazing what bar charts can tell you…
Much love from Copenhagen,
Rosa