Six world leaders and the heads of powerful multilateral organisations agreed Thursday to push for broader implementation of carbon pricing schemes to accelerate the fight against global warming.
Six world leaders and the heads of powerful multilateral organisations agreed Thursday to push for broader implementation of carbon pricing schemes to accelerate the fight against global warming.
The leaders of Canada, Germany, France, Mexico, Ethiopia and Chile, along with the IMF, World Bank, and OECD, pressed for the use of carbon pricing to cover 25 per cent of global emissions within four years, double the current level.
And they want pricing to cover 50 per cent of all emissions within one decade. They said faster and wider implementation is needed to achieve the goal of limiting the rise in the average global temperature to below 2°C above pre-industrial levels.
Carbon pricing aims to set a cost to polluters and create schemes through which they can pay that cost and be incentivised to lower emissions — for instance, through “cap and trade” systems that allow polluters to buy and sell carbon credits, as well as direct taxes on emissions.
The ambitious targets were announced by the World Bank and IMF-organised Carbon Pricing Panel one day before leaders and envoys from more than 160 countries gather in New York to sign the COP21 climate-change pact the world agreed to in Paris last December.
