Sigmar Gabriel
The minister of economy comments on the IPCC presentation by Ottmar Edenhofer.
On Monday, April 14, Ottmar Edenhofer, director of the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC), presented the Working Group III contribution to the IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report (AR5) for the first time to the public. Held at the TU Berlin, where Edenhofer is professor of economics of climate change, the launch also gave Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy Sigmar Gabriel the occasion to express his assessment of the results.
“Germany has already made significant headway with regard to clean energy production,” Gabriel said. “Now the main challenge is to ensure that a climate-friendly, long-term secure and independent energy production is actually feasible. If Germany, as an industrial country, can show that this is possible, it will have a ripple effect across the world.” Gabriel also emphasized the need of the nations’ ministers of the economy and finance to sit down at one table in order to advance negotiations.
Edenhofer likened the IPCC scientists to cartographers, who could not do more than show the various paths to achieving climate targets. “We’re currently on a track toward increasing emissions,” said the chief economist of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). It is the task of politicians, the public and society to make the decisions. “For this, we need a form of international cooperation.”
The launch, entitled “Science & Policy: Exploring Climate Solutions,” was a joint event of the IPCC, the Technical University of Berlin and the Stiftung Mercator. Some 1,200 guests and more than 100 media representatives attended. Chris Field, co-chair of Working Group II, presented the report on climate impacts and adaptation, recently released in Yokohama. The event thereby featured—a first—strategies for adaptation and mitigation by both IPCC Working Group II and III. IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri, for his part, gave an overview of the summary of the IPCC Synthesis Report and highlighted the importance of the panel for international negotiations.
The 5th Assessment Report is the product of the assessments of thousands of scientific publications by a total of 235 authors from 58 countries. Among these authors are the MCC scientists Felix Creutzig, Christian Flachsland, Michael Jakob, Jan Steckel and Christoph von Stechow. The report shows that greenhouse gas emissions have risen faster over the past decade than in the previous three decades, despite political measures. Nevertheless, the report also concludes that it is not too late to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius, and that this would have only minor effects on global economic growth.
You can access the summary for policy makers here
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