Least Developed Countries Support Strong Climate Targets

by Jeremy Osborn, Cross-posted from 350.org:

I’ve got some exciting news to announce.

Part of the UN negotiations on climate change is a ’shared vision’ exercise. Countries speak to the vision of the world for which they are negotiating. To date, not many concrete ideas had come out of this exercise. Until today, that is.

A group of countries called the Least Developed Countries gave a statement sharing their vision to the rest of the world. Their goal included mandating global targets (something the US in particular has been averse to) and stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions at 350ppm. Hooray for progress!

The LDC is a bloc of 49 countries - 33 in Africa, 10 in Eurasia, 1 in the Americas, and 5 in Oceania. It includes a few of the Small Island States like the Maldives and Tuvalu whose entire countries are threatened by climate change. These countries understand that they are going to pay the first and highest price from global warming. Their vision includes keeping that price low enough that they can survive it, and they just told the world that that means at least 350ppm.

We’re incredibly excited about the announcement and hope to work with many in the LDC countries to make sure their vision spreads.

About Phil

Phil has been a campus clean energy activist and helped organize Step It Up 2007, the largest national open source grassroots campaign to stop global warming. He is currently working on building an international movement, focusing specifically on mobilizing and educating people in Africa and the Middle East. His new project, 350.org, will stitch together a creative, powerful and unstoppable global movement pushing for bold and comprehensive action on climate change on the international level.

3 Responses to “Least Developed Countries Support Strong Climate Targets”

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1 Alex Tinker Dec 2nd, 2008 at 12:29 pm

49 down! Keep up the great work 350!
2 Jonathan Dec 10th, 2008 at 1:57 am

The LDC’s have nearly 800 million people - 12% of the world’s population (Wikipedia’s figures). The largest LDC is Bangladesh with 158 million, threatened both by sea level rise and loss of freshwater from Himalayan glaciers.

Note that 350ppm is an “initial” target only, and ultimately we will almost certainly need to go much lower. Hansen’s paper[1] says we need to get back below 325 ppm to restore the Arctic sea ice.

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126