Earth Day: Stern, Sachs and leading experts make COP21 climate demands

A group of leading scientists and economists including Nicholas Stern and Jeffrey Sachs have called for 75 per cent of fossil fuel reserves to be left in the ground, in a statement to coincide with Earth Day.

The Earth League, which includes Lord Stern, the British economist and academic; Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a climate scientist and adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel; and the U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs, urged world leaders to follow up on their pledges to take action on climate change.

The group highlighted what a global climate deal, due to be agreed at the COP21 UN climate change conference in Paris later this year, should include.

In its “Earth statement”, the group called on governments to adopt a target of cutting national carbon emissions to zero by 2050, implement a carbon price and has urged the wealthiest nations to lead the way with the most aggressive cuts.

The statement is also backed by Ottmar Edenhofer and Youba Sokona, who co-chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report into the options for avoiding dangerous climate change.

The group said that three-quarters of known fossil fuel reserves should be left in the ground if warming is not to breach the safe limit of 2°C agreed by governments.

Johan Rockström, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the statement’s lead author, said: “From a scientific perspective, 2015 is a decisive moment. The window to navigate ourselves free from a ‘beyond 2°C future’ is barely open. It’s the last chance to navigate ourselves towards a desired future. It’s so frustrating, because it’s the choice of moving down a business-as-usual route with devastating outcomes for humanity and, at the same time, we have this almost unprecedented opportunity, we can transform the world economy to a fossil fuel-free one and moreover do it in a way that is security and health-wise more attractive.”

The statement says that failure to act on climate change would bring a one in 10 chance of temperatures rising by more than 6°C by 2100, a level of risk comparable with 10,000 plane crashes daily worldwide.

Rockström said that scientific evidence indicates the Earth is approaching an irreversible tipping point when the planets system begins to accelerate human-caused warming.

Rockström said: “That’s the scientific nightmare. You don’t want the Earth to go from friend to foe…this could happen quite soon; we need to bend the curve on emissions over the next 10 to 15 years.”

The “Earth statement” also calls for developed nations to scale up financial support for developing countries to boost their resilience to the effects of climate change and protect against extreme weather events that a global warming is expected to bring.

Brian Hoskins, director of the Grantham institute for climate change at Imperial College London and one of the signatories, said that considering the importance of the Paris meeting, the attention given to climate change in the current UK general election campaign was “extremely disappointing”.

First celebrated in 1970, Earth Day is observed in more than 192 countries with festivals, rallies and various environmental activities.

More than one billion people participate in Earth Day campaigns every year and it is the largest civic event in the world, celebrated simultaneously around the globe.

In 1969, activist John McConnell proposed a day to celebrate the Earth and the environment at a Unesco Conference in San Francisco.

After being sanctioned in a Proclamation written by McConnell and signed by Secretary General U Thant at the United Nations, a separate Earth Day was founded by UN Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in on 22 April 1970.