Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies

for immediate release
 8 JULY 2008
 
The agreement at the Toyako Summit does not prevent global warming
Japan missed a huge opportunity

The leaders who gathered in Toyako agreed on the text of climate change in the Hokkaido Toyako Summit today.

It was a small progress from the last year's Heiligendamm Summit to agree by all of the G8 nations to expect on the UN process on ＜halving by 2050ｃ, which was not agreed on the whole by the opposition from US and Russia.

However, was it necessary to spend such a long time to agree on the long-term goal as an agenda to begin with?

In spite of the repeated calls from NGOs, and many countries and international organizations saying that the announcement of a concrete mid-term goal by developed countries with more importance and urgency is needed, especially for Japan prior to the G8 Summit, Prime Minister Fukuda did not accept the requisition obstinately. In fact, he enounced that ＜feasible numbers are neededｃ and ＜state numbers that are possible to achieveｃ instead of the numbers shown by the newest scientific knowledge that states developed countries need to have a reduction of 25 to 40% by 2020 in order to minimize the immediate and serious effects of climate change. Mid-term goal is a number that has to be achieved, not a number that is possibly achieved, and if it is not, it will create a huge change in the natural environment, economic cost, and serious effects on many human lives.

In addition, energy policy, the nucleus of the climate change policies, reflected the failure of the Japanese energy policy and has turned into a weak expression of ＜we recognize the important role of renewable energy in tackling climate change in the long term reducing our dependency on fossil fuelsｃ and there was not any bold and specific agreement for the acceleration of renewable energy, which is the most important for changing over to a low-carbon society.

In 2050, the leaders who participated in this G8 Summit will be already neither heads of states nor politicians. However, the country that made a biggest loss is Japan and Prime Minister Fukuda lost a huge opportunity to play a role in making a head start on solving climate change and receive recognition around the world and be welcomed by citizen in Japan.
G8 Summit is still not finished and MEM will be held tomorrow. We cannot expect a big success on it but we expect a conscience of G8 leaders as well as keeping an eye on consequence.
Rusutsu Resort/Toyako
CONTACT: Mika Ohbayashi