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EU

1.1. E.U. Urges Europeans to Act Locally to Help Stop Global Warming
30 May 2006 , By Constant Brand, Associated Press
The European Union launched a new awareness campaign Monday urging its citizens to help stop global warming, adding that just the smallest changes to everyday routines, like turning down the thermostat by a degree, can make a difference.
The campaign, dubbed "You Control Climate Change," gives citizens some 50 practical "easy-to-do" tips to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said.
"It makes clear to which extent we all are responsible for climate change and what individuals can and need to do to limit this threat," Barroso said.
The European Commission said that households within the 25-nation bloc contribute some 16 percent of the EU's total greenhouse gas emissions, most of which comes from the production and use of energy.
The EU awareness campaign, which encourages people to "Turn down. Switch off. Recycle. Walk," on posters, will be launched in each member country in the coming days, officials said.
Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, who joined Barroso at the launching of the campaign said his government would urge all citizens and business to participate.
Environmental group Friends of the Earth Europe criticized Barroso, however, for not abiding by his own call to cut emissions, because he owns a sport utility vehicle.
Barroso answered that the campaign was not forcing people to change the way they lived, but was only voluntary.
Tips being used in the campaign can also be downloaded from a special EU Web site -- http://www.climatechange.eu.com -- which includes other suggestions like turning off TVs, computers or stereos rather than putting them on standby-mode, a move which the EU said will save 10 percent in the energy those appliances use up.
As part of the campaign, school children are encouraged to sign a pledge to reduce emissions and to track their progress in cutting pollution.
The commission said that every European citizen is responsible for 11 tons of greenhouse gas emissions, mainly carbon dioxide, per year. Most of those emissions are caused by the production and use of energy, around 61 percent, it said, followed by transport, 21 percent, both of which use fossil fuels, like coal, gas and oil, that release carbon emissions when burned.

1.2. Big Talk, big emissions: Barroso slammed for climate hypocrisy as EU Commission launches global warming campaign
29 May 2006 , Friends of the Earth Europe
Today global warming campaigners protested outside the Berlaymont, bashing European Commission President Barroso for his hypocrisy on the issue of climate change. They offered Mr Barroso a shame award for driving a gas guzzling car and for disregarding the need to set binding fuel efficiency standards for cars sold in Europe.
High resolution photos of the action will be available for free use at http://www.foeeurope.org from 19:00 today.
Ironically, President Barroso today launched a European campaign to raise the awareness of EU citizens about their contribution to global warming. But Barroso himself drives a Volkswagen Touareg. This fuel-heavy 4x4 car has carbon dioxide emissions of at least 265g/km, over twice the EUâ?Ts own original objective for new cars.
Jan Kowalzig, Climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe said: »The Commission's new global warming campaign is called You control climate change? But EU Commission President Manuel Barroso clearly does not feel that this also applies to him!«
»Barroso is being hypocritical by launching a climate change campaign whilst continuing to drive his big gas-guzzling car, a monster SUV, in the narrow roads of Brussels . As a high-profile politician he should lead by example, making significant changes to his own lifestyle,« Kowalzig added.
Friends of the Earth Europe also calls on Mr Barroso to get tough on binding emissions standards for cars, to replace the current voluntary target that car makers are failing to meet.
The target originally proposed by the European Commission was a maximum of 120g CO2/km for an average car, by 2010. A study prepared for the European Commission reports that achieving this target would cost less than 600â,¬ per car, but savings from reduced fuel consumption would be twice as high over the lifetime of the car.
Jan Kowalzig said, »Greenhouse gas emissions from the transport sector have risen dramatically over the past decade. Binding efficiency standards for cars would help to reverse this trend. And in addition, if cars were to meet an efficiency standard of 120g CO2 per km, that could also reduce the huge economic costs of importing foreign oil by almost 30 billion Euros a year.«

ENERGY AND EMISSIONS

2.1. Emission reductions from Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism pass the one billion tonnes mark
9 June 2006 , UNFCCC
According to the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat, the Kyoto Protocol’s clean development mechanism (CDM) is as of today estimated to generate more than one billion tonnes of emission reductions by the end of 2012.
In addition to the implementation of climate-friendly policies at home, the 1997 landmark treaty allows industrialized countries to meet their emission targets through the treaty’s flexible mechanisms.
“We have crossed an important threshold with these emission reductions”, said Richard Kinley, acting head of the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat. “It is now evident that the Kyoto Protocol is making a significant contribution towards sustainable development in developing countries”.
The CDM allows industrialized countries to generate emission credits through investment in emission reductions projects in developing countries.
The one billion tonne mark in emission reductions corresponds to the present annual emissions of Spain and the United Kingdom combined.
The United Nations Climate Change Secretariat on Friday pointed towards a slightly more equitable geographic distribution of the projects.
In Africa , there are currently 27 activities in the CDM pipeline of which 5 have been registered. This constitutes a five-fold growth within a year.
More than 800 projects are presently in the pipeline, of which 210 are registered and another 58 are requesting registration. Last year, only around 140 activities were registered or being considered for registration.
“Whilst the mechanism is seeing very strong growth, the growth is still too unevenly distributed amongst regions", said Janos Pasztor, acting coordinator for Project Based Mechanisms with the UN Climate Change Secretariat. "Governments are expected to address this issue with inputs from the CDM Executive Board at the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference in Nairobi in November", he said.

2.2. Agentina supports renewables
7 June 2006
Argentina today became a formal partner of the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP). Argentina is the thirty-first country to become a partner of the REEEP, an international public-private partnership that promotes policies and regulations in support of renewable energy and energy efficiency. Argentina joins Brazil , Chile , Guatemala and Mexico as the fifth Latin American government to join REEEP.
By joining forces with the REEEP, Argentina intends to contribute to the development of regional policies by participating in initiatives across the Latin American region. Argentina looks forward to accelerating the dissemination of renewable energy projects as a means to improve energy security while lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
"In the Latin American region Argentina is playing an active role in the energy dialogue to support policies and regulations that significantly incorporate the development of energy efficiency and renewable energy into the energy mix," said Daniel Cameron, Secretary of Energy.
Argentina 's REEEP membership is another example of its commitment towards global climate protection and to sustainable development. Establishing international cooperation links with this initiative will allow increased development of environmentally-friendly renewable energy sources. These actions have already been launched with the enactment of the law 25029 on the "Promotion of Wind and Solar Energy", and through several existing legislative initiatives which reflect the high interest of institutions in advancing renewable energy.
Marianne Osterkorn, REEEP International Director, sees the commitment of the Argentinean government as a major step towards expanding the necessary policy changes required to create a marketplace for renewable energy.
Across Latin America REEEP is funding seven projects, including both national and regional initiatives in Mexico to develop policy frameworks in support of renewable energy. In Guatemala REEEP is collaborating with GVEP and Fundaci?n Solar to assist the Government with the country's first ever National Energy Policy. In Brazil , finance models will be developed for renewable energy projects in the Amazon as part of Brazil 's Universal Access Program (Luz para Todos) and the partnership is also assisting Petrobras with the development of a commercial ESCO.
REEEP is active globally, with over 58 on-the-ground projects targeting the development of policy or financial models that can be replicated by governments and project developers worldwide. The partnership has more than 160 members, including all G8 countries with the exception of Russia . In 2005, Angola , Canada , Chile , France , Hong Kong , Mexico , and South Korea all joined the REEEP in order to support their domestic renewable energy and energy efficiency programmes.

2.3. More pressure for climate protection - Germanwatch presents its new international Climate Change Performance Index
20 February 2006 , Germanwatch
The environment and development organisation Germanwatch presents today the results of the new international Climate Change Performance Index. The index compares the climate protection performance of 53 industrialised and emerging countries that, together, are responsible for 90 percent of the world-wide carbon dioxide emissions. Germany ranks fifth of the Index, the USA rank last but one, Saudi Arabia ranks last. The top ranks are covered by Iceland , Latvia and Great Britain .
"The goal of the Climate Change Performance Index is to increase the political and societal pressure on those countries that have neglected their homework on climate change up to now", explains climate expert Jan Burck who developed the index together with executive director Christoph Bals and climate expert Manfred Treber of Germanwatch. The index is the first to provide for a substantiated comparison of countries, for it does not only consider the absolute extend of the climate-damaging emissions of carbon dioxide, but also their trend.
The trend is recorded in the sectors of energy, industry, transport and buildings. The countries' climate policies constitute a third factor of the evaluation. The index is based on data of the International Energy Agency (IEA); the climate policy has been evaluated by 30 international climate protection experts.
One-eyed among the blind
"But even the countries that are ranking high can not just sit back and relax", emphasises Burck. "The index is only a comparison of countries. Those who rank high are more like the one-eyed among the blind." A lot would still remain to be done in climate protection.
Also Professor Hartmut Graßl, former director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, emphasises this during the presentation of the index in Berlin : "All countries compared in the index signed the Framework Convention on Climate Change and therefore committed themselves to prevent large-scale, dangerous climate change. In order to achieve this, the emissions have to decline by 80 percent in industrialised countries and by 50 percent on the global level by the middle of this century. The framework for is to be provided by politics.
The Climate Change Performance Index creates transparency and thus additional pressure for taking this challenge seriously."
"With the index we will regularly disclose which countries do fulfil their responsibility and which don't", says Germanwatch executive director Christoph Bals.
The country ranking clearly shows that many of the countries that contribute most to climate change have only fulfilled this responsibility inadequately so far. Six of the ten largest producers of carbon dioxide emissions that blow almost 60 per cent of the global emissions in the air, can be found in the last third of the index: Japan ranks 34th, Italy 38th, Canada 45th, the Russian Federation 48th and the USA rank 52nd, thus being the last but one.
Germany : accumulated needs regarding the heating of buildings and generation of electricity The index also shows that Germany does not rank high in all fields of climate protection.
Even though it is the leader in international climate policy and the only industrialised country which was able to slightly lower its transport emissions (rank 4), it ranks only 31st in the buildings sector, which records the heating needs. While the above-average increase in renewable energies since 1998 leads to a good 10th rank, it only comes down to a 23rd rank in the total generation of electricity.
Germanwatch deduces from these results that the ecological tax in the transport sector and the Renewable Energy Law in climate policy did not miss their targets. In the buildings sector it would still remain to be seen how the recent decisions on benefit measures for building insulation and restoration will affect the future results.
An important factor for the future performance of Germany , however, would particularly be the upcoming decisions on the construction of new power plants. "A trend towards carbon and lignite would thwart Germany 's entire climate policy", warns Christoph Bals. Also an expansion of nuclear power could not be a solution for the climate misery, due to the risk potential, costs and extrusion of the renewable energies from the market.
According to Bals' assessment, Germany will only be able to lower its carbon dioxide emissions in the energy sector in a sharp and sustainable way if something happens regarding both supply and demand. "We need investment security for energy efficiency measures. In addition to this, wind, solar and biomass facilities need to be expanded on a large scale."
Calculation method for the index
To calculate the index, as a first step, the carbon dioxide emissions of a country are put into relation to the Gross Domestic Product, primary energy consumption and the population.
Thereby it is taken into consideration that, for example, an American on average emits annually twenty times more carbon dioxide than an Indian. As a second step, the emission trends are being calculated, i.e. how did the emissions develop during the period between 1998 and 2003 in the sectors of energy, transport, buildings and industry, thereby taking into consideration that emerging countries like China and India have accumulated needs in industry. The last step concerns the evaluation of a country's national and international climate policy. The USA for example could make up ground of up to ten ranks in the index, if they would abandon their blocking attitude in climate policy.
The example of South Korea illustrates that a high level of carbon dioxide emissions does not come down to a bad evaluation in the index. Even though the country emits less than half of India 's amount of carbon dioxide, South Korea ranks 49th, while India ranks 10th. Together with Germany and Great Britain , India is the only large emitter that is comparatively well ahead in the index. China was able to position itself in the middle field, ranking 29th. From the group of developing countries, only 14 emerging countries, including China , India , Brazil and Morocco , can be found in the ranking. All other developing countries do not belong to the 53 world's largest producers of carbon dioxide emissions.
For further information: Christoph Bals, executive director of Germanwatch, +49 (0) 228-60492-17, bals@germanwatch.org; Jan Burck, climate expert, Germanwatch: +49 (0) 228-60492-14, burck@germanwatch.org.
The country ranking and the 16-pages publication: "The Climate Change Performance Index – A Comparison of the Top 53 CO2 Emitting Nations" are available on the internet at: http://www.germanwatch.org/ccpi.htm or can be ordered by phone or mail: +49 (0) 228-60492-0, versand@germanwatch.org.

2.4. What next? Carbon markets and clean development
Solar power in Brazil :The CDM funds clean energy projects in the South
19 May 2006, SciDev.Net
Catherine Brahic
The European Union announced last week that in 2005 it had emitted about 60 million tonnes of greenhouse gases — or 3.3 per cent — less than projected.
Although this may seem positive, it is potentially bad news for the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which has helped to fund hundreds of 'green' projects in the South.
Under the protocol, Europe must reduce emissions to eight per cent less than 1990 levels by 2012. One of the mechanisms for helping nations achieve this goal is the European emissions market, which allows countries that produce fewer emissions to sell their spare allowances to other countries.
The 15 May announcement left the market highly volatile. The price of one tonne of carbon dioxide emissions, which had reached an all-time high of 30 euros (US$38) at the end of April, plummeted to about eight euros before climbing back to around 15. With more than the expected emissions allowances in hand, demand vanished.
The fluctuating price of emitting a tonne of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere above Europe may seem a distant concern for climate change policymakers in developing countries. But it could have implications for their own efforts to limit contributions to climate change as they industrialise.
Clean, green development
This is because the CDM gives industrialised nations the option of offsetting their emissions at home by investing in projects that reduce emissions abroad. Some examples have been capturing gases emitted from landfills and using renewable forms of energy instead of natural gas, oil or coal to generate power.
If the price of investing abroad is cheaper than buying emissions on the EU market, as it was when the price of EU allocations climbed above 20 Euros, CDM projects become attractive options.
Their number rose rapidly last year. According to the World Bank, over 400 million tonnes of emissions reductions were agreed through the CDM in 2005 and in the first quarter of 2006.
European investors paid for more than half of this volume, with projects in China accounting for over two-thirds of it. Analysts at Point Carbon estimate that globally, in 2005, nearly two billion euros flowed to developing countries.
The surge in CDM projects is partly explained by last year's rise in the price of emissions allowances on the European market. With now lower prices, the coming years could see European interest in financing CDM projects dwindle. Whether or not this will happen is difficult to say at the moment and will depend on how the European market evolves.
Capping the CDM
Another issue related to the CDM could be of even greater concern. EU governments are currently discussing whether to limit the proportion of emissions their industries can offset through the CDM.
With carbon prices soaring, it seemed logical that governments give their industries the option of using as many CDM-based credits as they wish. Lower prices, however, could change that and governments could end up placing the cap as low as five per cent of emissions.
This would mean that if a company emits 100 million tonnes of greenhouse gases, it can offset only five million of them by investing in emission-reducing CDM projects.
Such a trend could pose a serious threat to future 'green' investment in the South. The final caps are due to be confirmed on 30 June, when EU members submit national allocation plans to the European Commission.
Ultimately, however, the fall in the price of carbon in Europe could be good news for international climate change negotiations.
Benito Müller, senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, United Kingdom , believes that the flurry of CDM activity since 2005 has been based on inflated prices and false impressions that there was a lot of money to be made out of European investors.
Realism, he says, should lead to a sounder environment for projects.
Moreover, if the price of polluting had remained high, it might have made climate negotiations for the period following the end of the Kyoto Protocol, commonly referred to as 'post-2012', more difficult.
"There is no objective to keep the cost of mitigating climate change high," says Halldor Thorgeirsson, deputy executive secretary to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Quite the contrary. The convention hopes the European trading scheme will demonstrate that a cleaner atmosphere is not that costly. "It is clear that policymakers will be looking to the market for indicators of the cost of polluting," he says.
Thorgeirsson says the EU trading scheme is important as it "demonstrates that access to the atmosphere has a value".
"You could say that so far, some decisions have been based on an incomplete economic analysis because they have not factored in the cost of releasing gases into the atmosphere," he says. "That cost has not been carried by the emitter, but has been shared by the rest of humanity."

CLIMATE IMPACTS

3.1. Desert cities are living on borrowed time, UN warns
5 June 2006 , The Guardian
John Vidal, environment editor
Climate change threatens conditions for 500 million. But report points to huge solar energy potential.
The 500 million people who live in the world's desert regions can expect to find life increasingly unbearable as already high temperatures soar and the available water is used up or turns salty, according to the United Nations.
Desert cities in the US and Middle East, such as Phoenix and Riyadh, may be living on borrowed time as water tables drop and supplies become undrinkable, says a report coinciding with today's world environment day.
Twentieth-century modernist dreams of greening deserts by diverting rivers and mining underground water are wholly unrealistic, it warns.
But the report also proposes that deserts become the powerhouses of the next century, capturing the world's solar energy and potentially exporting electricity across continents. For instance, a 310-square mile area of the Sahara could, with today's technology, generate enough electricity for the whole world.
The problem now facing many communities on the fringes of deserts, says the UN environment programme report, is not the physical growth of deserts but that rising water tables beneath irrigated soils are leading to more salinisation - a phenomenon already taking place across large tracts of China , India , Pakistan and Australia . The Tarm river basin in China , it says, has lost more than 5,000 square miles of farmland to salinisation in a period of 30 years.
The report suggests that Middle Eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia have used water from the desert very unwisely. Rather than growing staple crops such as wheat or tomatoes, it suggests that precious water should be used only for high value crops such as dates and fish farming.
The mining "fossil" water, laid down many millions of years ago, was once believed to have the potential to green deserts, but is now not thought to be a solution - except in Libya, where opinion is divided as to whether supplies may last 100 or 500 years.
But the greatest threat to people and wildlife living anywhere near deserts is climate change, which is already having a greater impact on desert regions than elsewhere. The Dashti Kbir desert in Iran has seen a 16% drop in rainfall in the past 25 years, the Kalahari a 12% decline and Chile 's Atacama desert an 8% drop.
Most deserts, says the report, will see temperatures rise by 5-7C by the end of the century and rainfall drop 10-20%. This will greatly increase evaporation and dust storms, and will move deserts closer to communities living on their edges.
The problems of more heat and lower rainfall are being compounded by the melting of glaciers in mountainous regions. These waters sustain life in deserts but would be perilously close to drying up if global warming continued as expected.
The glaciers in the mountains of south Asia are expected to decline by 40% to 80% in the next century with profound effects on large populations in Bangladesh , Pakistan , India and China .
Much of the water used for farming the south-west US, central Asia and around the Andes is drawn from rivers that originate in snow-covered mountains, says the report.
Development in the next 100 years is largely contingent on what happens to the climate. However, the report envisages that deserts will become more popular tourist destinations and that some of the plants that grow there could be "crops of the future".
"Deserts are threatened as never before by climate change, overexploitation of water and salinisation," said Professor Andrew Warren of University College London, one of the report's authors.
"We risk losing not only astounding landscapes and ancient cultures but also wild species that may hold keys to our survival."
LINK to Press release, full text, executive summary etc including PPP and vide news release: http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=480&ArticleID=5283&l=en.

3.2. 2 Studies Link Global Warming to Greater Power of Hurricanes
31 May 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/31/science/31climate.html
By John Schwartz
Climate researchers at Purdue University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology separately reported new evidence yesterday supporting the idea that global warming is causing stronger hurricanes.
That claim is the subject of a long-running scientific dispute. And while the new research supports one side, neither the authors nor other climate experts say it is conclusive.
In one new paper, to appear in a coming issue of Geophysical Research Letters, Matthew Huber of the Purdue department of earth and atmospheric sciences and Ryan L. Sriver, a graduate student there, calculate the total damage that could be caused by storms worldwide, using data normally applied to reconciling weather forecast models with observed weather events.
The Purdue scientists found that their results matched earlier work by Kerry A. Emanuel, a hurricane expert at M.I.T. Dr. Emanuel has argued that global warming, specifically the warming of the tropical oceans, is already increasing the power expended by hurricanes.
The approach used by the Purdue researchers, concentrating on what is called reanalysis data, has never been tried for this purpose before, Dr. Huber said in an interview, adding, "We were surprised that it did as well as it did."
In a statement accompanying the release of the study, Dr. Huber said the results were important because the overall measure of cyclone activity, whether through more intense storms or more frequent storms, had doubled with a one-quarter-degree increase in average global temperature.
In the other new study, Dr. Emanuel and Michael E. Mann, a meteorologist at Pennsylvania State University , compared records of global sea surface temperatures with those of the tropical Atlantic and said the recent strengthening of hurricanes was attributable largely to the rise in ocean surface temperature.
Some researchers say long-term cycles unrelated to global warming are the major cause of hurricane strengthening in recent decades. But Dr. Emanuel and Dr. Mann, whose work is to be published in Eos, a publication of the American Geophysical Union, maintained that the cycles, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, had little if any effect.
In fact, they reported that the most recent cooling cycle could just as well be attributed to the presence of particle pollutants in the atmosphere that block sunlight and, they said, could have temporarily counteracted some of the influence of warming from accumulating greenhouse gases. Dr. Mann said the new findings also suggested that as efforts to cut pollution by particles and aerosols continued to intensify, their cooling effects would diminish while the heating effects of greenhouse gases would remain unconstrained.
As a result, he said, "we could be in for much larger increases in Atlantic sea surface temperatures, and tropical cyclone activities, in the decades ahead." He joked that some might urge an increase in pollution, but called it "a Faustian bargain."
Stanley B. Goldenberg, a meteorologist with the Hurricane Research Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who has expressed skepticism about any connection between global warming and hurricane intensity, said he had not seen the new papers but had read nothing in other recent research to change his view.
"There's going to be an endless series of articles from this circle that is embracing this new theology built on very flimsy interpretation" of hurricane data, Mr. Goldenberg said. "If global warming is having an effect on hurricanes, I certainly wouldn't base it on the articles I've seen."

PUBLICATIONS

4.1. Annex I Expert Group web page and new reports available at www.oecd.org/env/cc/GFSD2006
The Annex I Expert Group on the UNFCCC is pleased to call your attention to a pertinent website containing papers and presentations from its annual Seminar -- "Working Together to Respond to Climate Change: Annex I Expert Group Seminar in conjunction with the OECD Global Forum on Sustainable Development" -- held in March 2006 in Paris. The website includes presentations and case studies by experts from developing and developed countries on the following topics:
Experiences and Approaches Related to Making the CDM Operational;
Approaches for Future Co-operation: Sectoral Crediting Mechanisms;
Approaches for Future Co-operation: Technology;
Experiences and Approaches Related to Adaptation (including water sector case studies for India , Argentina , Mexico , Zimbabwe ).
The site also includes five new reports released by the Annex I Expert Group in May 2006. The reports were launched at a side event within SB-24 in Bonn . The titles of these new studies are:
Adaptation to Climate Change: Key Terms, OECD/IEA, Levina, E. and Tirpak, D. (2006);
Domestic Policy Frameworks for Adaptation to Climate Change in the Water Sector, Part I: Annex I Countries, OECD/IEA, Levina, E. and Adams, H. (2006);
Issues Related to a Programme of Activities under the CDM, OECD/IEA, Ellis, J. (2006);
Sectoral Crediting Mechanisms for Greenhouse Gas Mitigation: Institutional and Operational Issues, OECD/IEA, Baron, R. and Ellis, J. (2006);
The Developing CDM Market: May 2006 Update, OECD/IEA, Ellis, J. and Karousakis, K. (2006).
They are all downloadable free of charge at the following web address: www.oecd.org/env/cc/GFSD2006.

4.2. CAN Europe 's report back from SB-24
CAN Europe's team prepared short reports from the proceedings at the session of the UNFCCC subsidiary bodies meeting (SB-24) that took place in Bonn in May on the following topics:
Post-2012 processes; LULUCF; Carbon Capture and Storage; Fluorinated Gases; Joint Implementation.
For a copy of the report or more information please get in touch with Katherine@climnet.org, Kirsten@climnet.org or Ruta@climnet.org directly.

4.3. WWF-UK report - The Balance of Power - ReducingCO2 emissions from the UK power sector
In order to inform our submission to the UK government's Energy Review in May, WWF-UK commissioned ILEX Energy Consulting to look at three scenarios for carbon dioxide emissions and fuel mix for the UK power sector for 2010, 2016, 2020 and 2025. The report concludes that by 2025 carbon dioxide emissions could be cut by 43-55 per cent from 1990 levels without the need for new nuclear capacity. In contrast, under business as usual emissions would fall by just 18 per cent.
The report can be downloaded from http://www.wwf.org.uk/filelibrary/pdf/ilex_report.pdf and the summary from http://www.wwf.org.uk/filelibrary/pdf/summary_of_ilex.pdf.

4.4. How much bioenergy can Europe produce without harming the environment?
EEA Report No 7/2006, published at: http://reports.eea.europa.eu/eea_report_2006_7.
Abstract: Increasing the use of renewable energies offers significant opportunities for Europe to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and secure its energy supply. However, the substantial rise in the use of biomass from agriculture, forestry and waste for producing energy might put additional pressure on farmland and forest biodiversity as well as on soil and water resources. It may also counteract other current and potential future environmental policies and objectives, such as waste minimisation or environmentally-oriented farming.

4.5. New WWF sponsored report on ETS and competitveness/jobs
WWF had the ZEW (a well known and respected German Economics Research Institute) look at the European ETS and the claims by industry that it destroys jobs and competitveness. Not surprisingly, ZEW, based on existing research in the matter, found such industry statements to be without basis, actually there may be benefits re. competitiveness in the future, though re. jobs there are winners and losers, depending on the sector.
The report "The Impacts of the European Emission Trading Scheme on Competitiveness and Employment in Europe" along with an Executive Summary, and the WWF summary position paper "Clearing the Mist - EU ETS, Competitiveness and Employment" and the WWF Press release on the study can be found at www.panda.org/powerswitch/etsimpacts.

4.6. Air quality and ancillary benefits of climate change policies
Technical report No 4/2006, published at: http://reports.eea.europa.eu/technical_report_2006_4.
Abstract: This report analyses projected changes in European air quality up to 2030. It explores the possible benefits of climate policies on air quality and the costs of air pollution abatement. The results show that stringent EU climate change policies (aimed at limiting temperature rise to 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2030) could: 1) improve Europe 's air quality; 2) cut premature deaths as a result of lower concentrations of ground level ozone and fine particulates (PM2.5); 3) save 10 billion EUR annually in air pollution control costs by 2030.


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