Mission 2020: A New Global Strategy to ‘Rapidly’ Reduce Carbon Emissions

In April a new global initiative called Mission 2020 was launched by Christiana Figueres, the former UN climate chief who oversaw the signing of the Paris Agreement on climate change in late 2015.

The aim of Mission 2020 is to bring “new urgency” to the “global climate conversation” with a call to begin “rapidly declining” global greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.

Today, in a co-authored commentary published in the journal Nature, Figueres sets out further details about Mission 2020’s six central calls to action.  The commentary is endorsed by 61 signatories, which include climate scientists as well as a range of NGO, religious, political, and business leaders.

Emissions peak
Figueres and colleagues argue that, if global warming is to be limited to between 1.5C and 2C by 2100, global emissions must peak before 2020 and then begin to rapidly decline.

Over the past three years, global CO2 emissions have leveled off, driven in part by large declines in coal use in China and the US.  While it is likely too early to say for certain if CO2 emissions have peaked, there is a reason to be cautiously optimistic.

However, peaking global emissions is in many ways the easy part.  Scientists say that to stave off potentially dangerous levels of warming later in the century, global emissions need to decline quickly to near-zero.

Read more at Mission 2020:  A New Global Strategy to ‘Rapidly’ Reduce Carbon Emissions