Copenhagen calling - Low Carbon Economy Index

The UN climate conference in Copenhagen in December 2009 presents a crucial opportunity for global leaders to lay the framework for a low carbon economy. Despite delays and challenges in the final stages of the negotiations, pledges from many of the world's largest economies in the immediate run up to the event have added new momentum to the Copenhagen process. The priority now is to convert these into an ambitious global deal, with the appropriate mechanism and adequate funding to deliver it.

There is mounting scientific and political consensus around the need to limit warming to 2oC. Three questions are therefore paramount:

  • Carbon budgets: What are the global and national carbon budgets that this translates into?
  • Adequacy of commitments: Will the sum of national commitments made at Copenhagen keep us within the carbon budget?
  • Policy framework: Will governments implement a set of national policies to ensure they meet these targets?

In the following interview Mark Nicholls, editor of Environmental finance discusses what we need to do to get to the long term carbon targets with Leo Johnson, partner in sustainability and John Hawksworth head of macro-economics at PwC.

To help assess the velocity of this transition to a low carbon economy,   PricewaterhouseCoopers has developed two new indices for the G20 economies:

  • The PwC Low Carbon Achievement (LCA) Index, which assesses how much progress countries have made this century in reducing the carbon intensity [i] of their economies; and
  • the PwC Low Carbon Challenge (LCC) Index, which assesses the 'distance to go' for key countries in reducing their carbon intensity.

For the full picture visit our Low Carbon Economy Index Microsite to download the report.

[1] Carbon intensity is defined as the ratio of carbon emissions to GDP. By focusing on trends in carbon intensity rather than total carbon emissions we do not penalise fast-growing emerging economies such as China and India and we automatically adjust for fluctuations in GDP due to the economic cycle (including the current recession). Our report focuses on carbon emissions from energy use since these are the most significant factor behind global warming, but progress on reducing carbon emissions from forestry and land use changes will clearly also be important and are factored into our model projections at the global level.