U.S., Japan, G8 Commit to Climate Change Action

Support for global action to curb climate change is growing stronger within the G8 group of the world’s largest industrial democracies, which includes the United States and Japan.
During an April 14 meeting in Tokyo, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Japan’s Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida expressed “serious concern about anthropogenic climate change and its worsening impacts.”

 “Cooperative efforts between the United States and Japan demonstrate our shared commitment to advancing climate action in the multilateral context,” the two officials said in a joint statement. “We plan to deepen our mutual engagement in advancing low-carbon growth.”
At a news conference in Tokyo Monday, Kishida said, “Regarding climate change, we agreed to cooperate based on the process of UN-led negotiations on building the future framework and to low-carbon growth realization and penetration, a society resilient toward climate change, including adaptive capability and disaster mitigation.”
The Kyoto Protocol, which in December was extended to a second commitment period, is seen as an important first step towards a truly global emission reduction regime that will stabilize global greenhouse gas emissions and provide the architecture for the future international agreement on climate change.
At the UN climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa in 2011, a Working Group was established to develop a new treaty that would set binding emissions limits not just for 36 developed economies as the Kyoto Protocol does, but for all the 195 governments that are Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The new treaty would, for the first time include developing countries such as China and India, as well as the United States which refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.
The Working Group is to complete its work as early as possible, but no later than 2015, in order to adopt this protocol, legal instrument or agreed outcome with legal force at the 21st session of the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties and for it to come into effect and be implemented from 2020.
The two governments expect to cooperate and work with other countries through the Low Emission Development Strategies Global Partnership and the East Asia Low Carbon Growth Partnership.
They are also collaborating on ways to mobilize private finance for action in developing countries and on reducing short-lived climate pollutants.
The G8 foreign ministers during the meeting in London April 10-11 restated their commitment to “long term efforts with a view to limiting effectively the increase in global average temperature below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, consistent with science.”
Even Foreign Minister John Baird of Canada, the only country to have abandoned the Kyoto Protocol after ratifying it, agreed to this statement.

ENS