Climate Action 2010-2011

Foreword
smarter electricity grids, and more sustainable forms of
transport and pay greater attention to energy efficiency in
new and existing buildings, for instance.
UNEP is spearheading a campaign, ‘30 ways in 30
days’, showcasing projects where public and private
partnerships are catalysing low carbon, resource efficient
Green Economy transitions. The campaign is also
spotlighting how emerging economies are developing
solutions towards adapting their economies to the climate
change already underway.
• Prosol is a partnership between UNEP, the Italian
Ministry for Environment, Land and Sea and Tunisia’s
National Agency for Energy Conservation aimed at
expanding the market for solar hot water heaters. It has
helped more than 105,000 Tunisian families get their
hot water from the sun, based on a novel system of
lending over US$60 million.
Over 40 suppliers and more than 1000 installation
companies have sprung up to service the market. An
average four-person household with an electric water
heater is responsible for producing about eight tonnes of
CO 2
emissions annually – almost double that generated
by a typical modern automobile – while a solar water
heater can save the cost and emissions of 12 bottles of
liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) every year.
• In Kenya, UNEP, with funding from the Global
Environment Facility has assisted the local power
company with new drilling techniques in order to
reduce the risks of exploring for geothermal power and
increase the size of electricity generating wells.
The work has assisted in Kenya’s expansion of
geothermal – aimed at bringing the output of power from
the main plant north of Nairobi from the current 150
MW up to 430 MW, or almost 40 per cent of Kenya’s
annual requirement while triggering interest among other
countries along the Great Rift Valley including Djibouti,
Ethiopia and Uganda.
The success of many of these projects is often linked to
the catalytic impacts of the carbon markets developed under
the UN climate convention treaty alongside the adoption of
smart market mechanisms such as feed-in tariffs.
UNEP’s overarching Green Economy work, which will
lead to a landmark report to be launched at the UNEP
Governing Council/Global Ministerial Environment
Forum in February 2011, is bringing together many of these
market-empowering mechanisms and intelligent incentives
in order to further catalyse a transition to a low carbon path.
Sometimes small-scale initiatives can bring about
significant change, specially, if scaled up. During the
opening of the 65th session of the UN General Assembly,
UNEP joined the Global Alliance for Clean Cook
Stoves building on eight years of scientific work on the
Atmospheric Brown Cloud.
The alliance, announced during the Clinton Global
Initiative forum and spearheaded by the UN Foundation,
aims to phase-out around three billion inefficient cook
stoves using fuels such as biomass, dung and other wastes.
Emissions from these stoves are linked with the deaths of
over 1.6 million people a year while also contributing to
pressure on forests for fuel wood.
The initiative may also provide some important climate
benefits: black carbon, one of the pollutants concerned, is not
only a health hazard but can contribute to global warming
both via atmospheric impacts and by making glaciers and
ice masses darker and more vulnerable to warming.
Black carbon is not the only so called non-CO 2
pollutant linked with climate change. Methane, including
emissions from waste rotting in rubbish tips; low level or
tropospheric ozone; many of the fluorinated gases used
in products such as refrigerants and nitrogen compounds
including ones produced from agriculture, may together
be responsible for perhaps as much as 50 per cent of
current climate change.
Many of them need to be tackled anyway for reasons
ranging from health to damage to ecosystems including
those in the marine environment. And most have short
life-times of days, weeks, months or years when
compared with CO 2
.
Over the past 18 years, much has been achieved in
terms of the science of climate change and the evolution
of policies and instruments to combat it including the
development of carbon markets and mechanisms such as
the Clean Development Mechanism.
New science, including and how it relates to forests and to
non-CO 2
pollutants, is widening the lens and the scope for
action and when you look around the world, the uptake of
clean technologies in many countries is far faster than some
may have presumed only a decade ago. Indeed in 2009, new
investment in renewables outstripped new investment in
fossil fuel generation and nuclear combined according to the
UNEP Sustainable Energy Finance Initiative.
Copenhagen did not deliver the decisive, new global
agreement that seemed possible and which is urgently
needed. But, as the new gap analysis shows, neither
did Copenhagen fail. If all the pledges are fulfilled and
leadership is shown, then this new climate co-operation
between developed and developing countries take the
world a long way towards where it needs to be in 2020.
That leadership must evolve onto a higher level in
Cancun, Mexico en route to the UN Climate Change
Conference in South Africa in 2011. Cancun must
be a time where action on financing, mitigation and
adaptation matures and moves forward.
Above all, Cancun must demonstrate to society as a whole
that governments understand the gaps left by Copenhagen,
but at the same time remain serious and committed to
counter climate change, in order to meet wider development
and environmental goals and ensure that the next generation
will inherit a productive and functioning planet.
Achim Steiner is UN Under-Secretary-General and
Executive Director of the United Nations Environment
Programme (UNEP). He has worked both at the
grassroots level and the highest levels of international
policymaking to address the interface between
environmental sustainability, social equity,
and economic development.
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