Victoria's Green Matters - 18th June 2015

Deal With IT's Secretary Victoria Nicholls writes a regular column in the East Kent Mercury:

Amazing news this week! The G7 nations have agreed on strong measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions by phasing out the use of fossil fuels by the end of the century. Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has headed the negotiations that have reached this historic conclusion. There was also agreement on limiting average global temperature rise to 2°C as compared with pre-industrial levels.

This result makes for great hopes of a plan for complete decarbonisation at the Paris climate talks in December. It is unfortunate that leaders had failed to sign up to an immediate agreement on binding targets but we must be grateful for what we have. This agreement has followed the UN climate change panel, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), in its recommendations that greenhouse gas emissions must reduce from between 40% and 70% by 2050, using 2010 as a baseline.

The G7, Germany, France, Britain, USA, Canada, Japan and Italy, have also agreed to work for an end to extreme poverty and hunger worldwide, aiming to reduce the number of people suffering hunger and malnutrition by 500 million by 2030. There is also an agreement to improve the global response to crises such as the Ebola epidemic.

We can only celebrate such a momentous agreement between such powerful nations and we can look forward to the Paris talks when we hope that we can get a definite agreement to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions well before the end of the century.