COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - The world is within striking distance of a U.N. deal to curb greenhouse gas emissions enough to avoid the worst effects of global warming, a U.N. report said on Sunday as delegates gathered for climate talks in Copenhagen.
"For those who claim that a deal in Copenhagen is impossible: they are simply wrong," Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), said as delegates gathered for December 7-18 talks on a new deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.
"We are in closing range of a deal." he told a news conference ahead of the 190-nation talks.
UNEP and British climate change expert Nicholas Stern said in a report adding up commitments to date that the gap between countries' strongest proposed greenhouse gas cuts and what is needed may be only a few billion metric tones.
The report said the world should aim for maximum emissions of 44 billion metric tones a year in 2020 to have a chance of limiting a rise in world temperatures to a widely accepted benchmark of no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times.
Current promised curbs on emissions proposed by developed and developing nations would be enough to limit emissions to 46 billion metric tones by 2020, if fully implemented.
In recent days and weeks, countries including the United States, China, India, Brazil and Indonesia have laid out new targets mean to slow climate change that may bring more droughts, floods, heat waves and rising sea levels.
The report said that current world emissions are about 47 billion metric tones a year. Without any curbs, emissions would rise to the mid-50s or higher by 2020, the study said.
By contrast, many experts say pledges made so far are not enough to reach the benchmarks that have been set for averting the worst of climate change, such as ensuring that global emissions fall after 2020.
Steiner said that further use of emissions cuts on aviation and shipping or wider use of forests to soak up emissions could help close the gap.
Steiner said the gap between scientists' views on what must be done and what is on the table in Copenhagen had narrowed significantly. "There is still a significant gap but people overestimate the impossibility of actually closing that gap."
"You could say that we are within a few gigatonnes of actually having a deal in Copenhagen in terms of the target for 44 gigatonnes by 2020," he said.
He said a realistic figure for the current gap between the 190 nations' pledges and where they needed to be at the of the conference was probably around 2 gigatonnes, with a range in the report of between 1 and 5 gigatonnes.
"This signals ... that if leaders want to negotiate a deal, they have the means to do so, and to do so in a way that would allow an agreement at the end of Copenhagen."
(Reporting by Alister Doyle and Anna Ringstrom)
