Multinationals urge governments to deliver global climate policy

Influential business coalition releases policy roadmap urging tougher action on climate change ahead of this week's IPCC meeting

A group of 46 of the world's largest companies has called on governments to deliver a clear international policy framework to combat climate change, including a global emissions trading mechanism, new laws demanding minimum standards of energy efficiency, particularly for buildings and transportation, and greater subsidies for low-carbon technologies.

The recommendations were included in a new policy roadmap released last week by the Combat Climate Change (3C) coalition of businesses ahead of this week's meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Valencia.

"The policy solution to combating climate change should be very clear by now, " said Peter Darbee, chairman and chief executive officer of energy giant and 3C member PG&E. "There are specific, achievable action steps that the G8+5 governments should consider immediately and we need to have the leaders of the most important economies in the world step forward and show leadership in their own policy development."

The group urged the world's government's to "set a global goal of a maximum acceptable temperature increase and derive global emissions targets from this goal".

As part of the roadmap, the 3C companies - which include global heavyweights such as BP, Centrica, Citigroup, Dow Chemical, E.ON, General Electric, Lufthansa, Reuters, SAP and Siemens - also committed to supporting the development of new climate change policies through the adoption of their own environmental best practices, including efforts to reduce their carbon emissions and the adoption of environmental reporting mechanisms.

The 3C coalition is just the latest in a long line of business groups to lobby for more stringent climate change regulations, but with the combined companies in the group employing 4.5m people in 220 countries and boasting a combined turnover of $1.8tr, its recommendations are likely to have considerable clout.

The release of the roadmap coincides with the meeting in Valencia this week of the IPCC as it attempts to thrash out its final recommendations for policymakers ahead of the UN conference on climate change in Bali next month.

The meeting will see the UN's top climate scientists attempt to boil down their three-volume assessment of current climate change science into a summary version for policymakers that will be released this Saturday.

What the group includes in its recommendations is likely to be significant because the document is likely to form the starting point for any post-Kyoto agreement when the UN meets to discuss climate change next month.

Environmentalists have already expressed concerns that the IPCC is under pressure to water down its recommendations for policy makers and call for measures that are politically feasible rather than those demanded by the current scientific consensus.

The WWF today said that there were already signs that important conclusions from the original IPCC reports had been trimmed from the draft policy report, including evidence on the "increased incidence of potentially destructive hurricanes, warming of the upper Pacific Ocean and the loss of glaciers in the European Alps".

"There is a contrast between the immense wealth of the IPCC's work and the politically inspired trimming back in this report," said Hans Verolme, Director of WWF's Global Climate Change Programme.

Other environmental groups have gone further still, arguing that the original IPCC reports, released earlier this year, and their recommendations for a 60 per cent cut in emissions by 2050 are far too conservative and based on outdated research.