| 英文摘要: | International negotiations about climate change can either succeed by establishing legally binding commitments that ensure a 2 °C trajectory, or fall short of this target and thus utterly fail. At least this is how most people perceive them, suggests Pete Betts, director of the International Climate Change (ICC) directorate in the UK government Department for Energy and Climate Change. Of course, given the scientific consensus on the anthropogenic drivers of climate change (recently confirmed by the 5th Assessment Report of the IPCC), we should all hope that the next rounds of climate change negotiations — particularly the UN climate change Conference of the Parties to be held in Paris next year to establish the new climate deal — will end successfully.
The truth, however, is that things are much more complicated than that. Betts explains how progress has been achieved over the years in climate negotiations, with commitments from all major economies, albeit not enough to put us on track for climate security. He says that building global climate consensus involves several different challenges, beyond the actual negotiation at international meetings. Government experts are involved in a variety of activities that help to align countries' positions on climate change mitigation. ICC officials in the UK, for example, operate a four-pillar strategy. The first is the negotiation of international agreements with the goal of keeping the global mean temperature increase below 2 °C relative to the pre-industrial level; another focuses on climate finance to help developing countries to adapt to climate change; a third pillar focuses on seeking to shift political conditions in various countries by working with a number of stakeholders (including NGOs and businesses) to encourage low-carbon development; the fourth pillar is encouraging European Union leadership, notably through seeking consensus on a credible 2030 greenhouse gas target.
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