Three Years to Safeguard our Climate, a new Nature comment published this week by B Team leader Christiana Figueres, and signed by dozens of scientists, policy makers and corporate leaders including Sharan Burrow, Paul Polman and Mary Robinson, makes clear that if we allow carbon dioxide emissions to rise beyond 2020, or even remain level, the temperature goals set in the Paris Climate Agreement “become almost unattainable,” and also jeopardize our ability to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals agreed in 2015.
The paper sets out milestones in six sectors – energy, infrastructure, transport, land, industry and finance – which must be reached by 2020 to keep those targets in reach. They include:
- No coal-fired power plants are approved beyond 2020, and all existing ones are being retired.
- Electric vehicles make up at least 15% of new car sales globally, a major increase from the almost 1% market share that battery-powered and plug-in hybrid vehicles now claim.
- Land-use policies that reduce forest destruction and shift to reforestation and afforestation efforts.
- Governments, private banks and lenders such as the World Bank to issue more ‘green bonds’ to finance climate-mitigation efforts, creating an annual market that, by 2020, processes more than 10 times the $81 billion of bonds issued in 2016.
Click here to read more about Mission 2020’s plan to accelerate climate ambition and bend the curve on emissions by 2020.