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EU warns of global climate chaos

"[These proposals] would be by far the most ambitious ever in the world."

Jose Manuel Barroso, European Commission president

The European Commission has stepped up the EU's campaign to lead the fight against climate change by warning on Wednesday that global warming was so catastrophic that it could trigger regional conflicts, poverty, famine and migration.

Setting out a strategy to combat global warming and improve Europe's energy security at the same time, it said the secondary effects of climate change, such as conflicts elsewhere, would inevitably affect even a less vulnerable Europe.

In the wake of last year's Stern report in the UK, the commission forecast severe impacts on certain ecosystems, with some species and habitats disappearing, and a decline in global food production, with the spread of infectious diseases such as malaria and dengue fever.

Calling for an international agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2020, it said water scarcity and quality would become problems for many regions, while sea levels would rise and some low-lying islands such as the Maldives and coastal regions such as the Bangladesh delta could be submerged.

Weather impacts are likely to include higher temperatures, heatwaves and increasing dryness, with the risk of drought and fires, and elsewhere increasing rainfall, storms and floods.

Southern Europe, including Italy and Spain, would be the region most affected in Europe.

The commission concluded that if urgent action was not taken, billions of dollars worth of damage would be the result.

It aims to steer the world towards keeping the rise in temperature to no more than 2oC above pre-industrial levels.

The commission said that if temperatures rise by 2.2oC, an extra 11,000 people in Europe will die within a decade and from 2071 there would be 29,000 extra deaths a year in southern Europe alone. Only slightly fewer -- 27,000 -- would die in northern Europe.

It said there was a 50 percent chance that global temperatures would rise this century by more than 5oC.

The dire warnings came as the commission asserted the EU's ambition to be the world's first low-carbon economy by proclaiming a global target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2020.

Current EU energy policies were unsustainable and would increase Europe's emissions by 5 percent by 2030, it added.

However, the new policy came under immediate attack from green groups and members of the European Parliament, who accused the commission of leaving the initiative to international agreements, including the recalcitrant US, to hit the 30 percent target, while aiming for only a 20 percent cut in the EU's own emissions.

Campaigners also criticized the commission for setting a "paltry'' renewable energy target of 20 percent and for covertly reopening the door for nuclear power.

But they welcomed the binding minimum target of 10 percent for biofuels in passenger vehicles by 2020.

Brussels said urgent measures to reduce greenhouse gases would only slightly reduce economic growth in developed countries -- by 0.14 percent a year.

Announcing the new energy strategy, to be discussed by an EU summit in early March, Jose Manuel Barroso, the commission president, called on Europe to lead the world into a new, post-industrial revolution.

If adopted, he said, these proposals "would be by far the most ambitious ever in the world."

Stavros Dimas, the environment commissioner, said the unilateral target of cutting emissions by at least 20 percent by 2020 was more than double the 8 percent target for 2012 set out in the Kyoto protocol.

But he added: "We are not going to be effective if we act alone.''

Barroso said this week's talks in Washington with US President George W. Bush had convinced him that the US "will change and will be much more ambitious in future when it comes to fighting climate change.''

Barroso dismissed criticism that the renewables target -- designed in part to reduce dependency on fuel from abroad -- was inadequate.

But Greenpeace said that to be sustainable the target should be at least 35 percent.

The commission warned that with nuclear power now providing 31 percent of electricity output, EU countries phasing out atomic power plants must replace them with other low-carbon energy sources.

It emphasized that nuclear power was one of the cheapest sources of low-carbon energy.

The commissioners said it was up to each country to decide, but their remarks were seen as a clear nod to countries such as Germany that are already thinking of building new nuclear plants.
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