It must also usher in an era when governments, businesses, activists and citizens find innovative ways to make that shift happen, experts told a Paris meeting of climate scientists.
“Paris will not solve all, of course,” said Laurence Tubiana, France’s ambassador to the U.N. climate talks. “But we have to have every actor believing ... that a low-carbon resilient economy is the future.”
“Coalitions of the working” on climate-related issues such as protecting forests and pricing carbon are already making progress and “moving ahead of the general consensus” in the U.N. negotiating halls, said Rachel Kyte, vice president of the World Bank and its climate change envoy.
Effective action on climate change requires a new global deal, but may be built best by the most willing coming together and creating incentives for others to join them, Tubiana said.
“We have no top-down solution,” she emphasized. That means the Paris gathering will need to find fresh ways to cobble together efforts by governments, business, religious leaders, non-governmental groups and others, she said.
The change required is nothing less than the “induced implosion of the carbon economy”, said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
Without that, “we have not the slightest chance of avoiding dangerous, maybe disastrous climate change”, he warned.
A Moral Decision
Transformation will be led not by a new U.N. climate deal, he and others said, but by influential leaders constructing a broad social movement against climate change, fashioned on movements like the one that ended the international slave trade.
Read more at Paris Climate Deal Must Signal End to Carbon Economy: Experts
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