"Adding Up" Pledges Gets Official in UNFCCC!

By Andrew P. Jones
April 21, 2010

A working group of the UNFCCC officially requested the sort of  “Adding Up” of mitigation pledges that we do with C-ROADS and the Climate Scoreboard!

Here’s the accepted text:

The AWG-KP requested the secretariat to prepare for consideration by the AWG-KP at its twelfth session:

(a)  A paper compiling pledges for emission reductions and related assumptions provided by the Parties to date and the associated emission reductions;

(b)  A technical paper laying out issues relating to the transformation of pledges for emission reductions into quantified emission limitation and reduction objectives.

Note — this has passed the KP (Kyoto Protocol), not the LCA (Long-term Cooperative Action) yet, but feels significant for our work with C-ROADS and the Climate Scoreboard. And for our collaboration with other scientific groups working on this effort.

One big reason that this “Adding Up” work was proposed is because **we and others first established that it could be done **with strong science behind it. They needed a prototype first, we think. (And, for the history books, the first ever adding up of climate pledges was shared March 2009 in Copenhagen in our “Sawin et al.” paper).

For an extended analogy about how this work is a lot like paying the bar bill, read a post from last year, “Three Climate Negotiators Walk into a Bar…”