Copenhagen target converter

As we near the 15th Annual UNFCCC conference in Copenhagen more and more countries are pledging emissions cuts. But the devil is always in the details, as a recent article in the Guardian pointed out.

For instance, Russia recently announced that it would cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 25% on 1990 levels. In other words in by the year 2020 Russia’s yearly emissions (measured in tonnes of CO2) will be at 75% of what they were in 1990. This sounds good on paper since we generally assume that yearly emissions have increased since 1990 for all countries. But the collapse of the Soviet economy in 1991 led to massive fall in emissions, meaning that a 25% cut on Russia’s 1990 emissions levels actually equates to a 25.6% increase on Russia’s 2007 emissions levels. In other words, they’re allowing themselves to increase their pollution levels!

In order to help other people make sense of the emission targets being pledged by the various countries, over the last couple of days I’ve helped to develop a “target converter” for Sandbag, a non-profit climate change campaign.

It takes an emissions target and a baseline year for a given country and then calculates what the equivalent percentages are for all the other years for which emissions data is available for that country (data source is UNFCCC). So for instance, for Russia’s target of a 25% reduction on 1990 levels we get:

You can find the target converter at http://sandbag.org.uk/targetconverter.