The head of the UN’s climate change secretariat, Christiana Figueres, has praised the leadership of the Group of Least Developed Countries, after it signalled that it was willing to sign up to binding emission reduction targets as part of any new international climate treaty.
Writing on Twitter, Figueres said the group had shown “remarkable leadership ahead of [a] 2015 agreement”, which aims to provide a new draft international climate change treaty that will then be enacted by 2020.
Figueres was responding to reports that the group of 49 LDCs, which together cover 12 per cent of the world’s population, are willing to agree to legally binding emission targets as part of the proposed new treaty.
The topic of binding emission targets has undermined the long-running UN-backed negotiations for years, with poorer nations and emerging economies consistently refusing to sign up to binding emission targets without more ambitious commitments from those industrialised nations that are responsible for the vast majority of historic greenhouse gas emissions.
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