Strategic Panorama 2009 - 2010 - IEEE

Climate change and its security implications
As to other key mitigation measures, the following should be stressed:
• Advanced nuclear energy; advanced renewable energies, including
tidal and wave power, concentrated solar energy and photovoltaic
solar energy.
• More efficient aircraft; advanced hybrid and electric vehicles with
safer and more powerful batteries.
• Integrated design for commercial buildings, including technologies
such as high-tech meters providing feedback and control; photovoltaic
solar energy incorporated into buildings.
• Advanced energy efficiency; CCS for the production of cement,
ammoniac and iron; inert electrodes for aluminium production.
• Improved crop yields.
• Green roofs and filters to optimise the oxidation of CH4.
There is high confidence that neither adaptation nor mitigation alone
can prevent all the impacts of climate change. Adaptation is necessary,
in both the short and the long term, to address the impacts that warming
would cause, even in the more modest stabilisation scenarios envisaged.
There are obstacles, limits and costs that are not fully known. Adaptation
and mitigation may be complementary and can jointly bring about a sizeable
reduction in the risks posed by climate change.
The United Nations conference on climate change held in Copenhagen
in December 2009 was intended as the culmination of two years of international
negotiations. It was convened with the intention that the international
community would come up with a global commitment to combat
climate change as a follow-on from the Kyoto protocol, which expires in
2102 and to which major contaminators like the United States and China
are not parties. However, it ended up as merely a minimum agreement
between the 119 participating heads of state and government. The text of
the agreement establishes that climate change is one of the major challenges
of our time, that temperature increase should be under two degrees
and that emissions should reach a ceiling as soon as possible - and all
this will supposedly be achieved with voluntary emission reduction targets
which the countries will submit by February 2010. The developed countries
are thus committed to submitting emission reduction targets by that
date. These reductions and the financing for developing countries will be
declared, measured and verified by the UN.
Europe was confident that the United States’ commitment would meet
the announced expectations, with reductions of between 26% and 33%,
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