Philippines makes conditional offer to cut emissions by 70%
The Philippines said Thursday it would cut the archipelago nation's carbon emissions by 70 percent by 2030 but only if it receives support from developed nations. The country's climate change mitigation and adaptation plan was submitted to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change on Thursday after it was approved by President Benigno Aquino, his spokesman Herminio Coloma said in a statement. If fully implemented, the Philippines' carbon emissions should drop 70 percent by 2030 from 2000 levels, said Lucille Sering, head of the country's Climate Change Commission. The submission came ahead of upcoming climate change talks in Paris later this year. "These reductions in emissions are conditional and will be pursued if sufficient financial resources, technology development and transfer, and capacity building will be made available to the Philippines after the Paris climate talks in December," Coloma said. A UN summit in Copenhagen in 2009 set a goal of keeping temperature rises at no more than two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) from pre-industrial times, a level that is still expected to cause growing droughts and disasters but which scientists consider comparatively manageable. Experts say this can be achieved if wealthy nations go ahead with plans to cap carbon emissions by 2020 and developing countries, including the Philippines, do so a decade later. However financing is a key sticking point between developed and developing nations, which have been negotiating the new pact for years. Developing countries insist that rich nations must show how they intend to keep a promise made in 2009 to boost climate-related finances to $100 billion per year from 2020. They also want money in the interim, to finance the costly shift from fossil fuel-based to sustainably powered economies, and to bolster their defences against the effects of climate change. Reuben Muni, a climate and energy campaigner for the Philippines from the environmental group Greenpeace, criticised the conditional nature of Manila's offer and said the country could start by cutting its heavy reliance on coal for power generation. "Do we mean to say we will do nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions otherwise?", he told AFP. A total of 136 nations have submitted their initial intended nationally determined contributions to the UN, Sering said.
