Climate Scoreboard – keep track of COP15

John Elkington

December 7, 2009

Here’s a clever idea. Sustainability Institute has launched the Climate Scoreboard, an online tool that allows anyone to track progress in the ongoing negotiations to produce an international climate treaty. The Scoreboard allows users to check, on a daily basis, whether proposals in the treaty process commit countries to enough greenhouse gas emissions reductions to achieve widely expressed goals, such as limiting future warming to 1.5 to 2.0°C (2.7° to 3.6°F) above pre-industrial temperatures.

The Scoreboard will follow the negotiations in Copenhagen from day to day, and continue tracking progress in the months following the conference, addressing the question: if current proposals for emissions reductions were implemented how much future warming would be avoided?

In advance of the opening of the Copenhagen Conference, the Scoreboard shows that, while current proposals would reduce warming in 2100 relative to a scenario with no reductions in emissions, proposals are not yet ambitious enough to limit temperature increase to 2°C (3.6°F) over pre-industrial temperatures. The Scoreboard estimates a temperature increase of 3.8°C (7.0°F) over pre-industrial if current proposals were implemented as compared to a 4.8°C (8.7°F) temperature increase by 2100 without emissions reductions.

The Scoreboard results are delivered as a widget that can be embedded in media reports, blogs, websites, and Facebook. I confess that I haven’t checked the guts of the analysis, but this seems like a truly great way to make COP15 accessible to the wider world.