Climate Pollutants Initiative
On February 16th, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced the creation of a multilateral governance effort to address short-lived climate pollutants entitled, The Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short-Lived Climate Pollutants.
Environment ministers from Canada, Mexico, Sweden, and Bangladesh, as well as Ghana’s Ambassador to the US joined Secretary Clinton, Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the UN Environment Program and Lisa Jackson, Administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency — all founding members of the initiative — for the event.
The initiative seeks to address the problem of short-lived pollutants such as methane, black carbon (soot), and hydrofluorocarbons. The goal of the initiative is to reduce emissions in order to delay rising global temperatures and buy time to address the reduction of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Additionally, it is hoped that this initiative will help to prevent millions of deaths caused by soot and help avoid as much or more than 30 million tons of agricultural production lost annually to black carbon pollution.
A number of solutions to the problem of black carbon are outlined in this UNEP report.
The initiative will be managed by UNEP, and seeks to augment the work of Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, the Arctic Council, the Montreal Protocol, and the Global Methane Initiative. The founding members of the initiative are aware that reducing short-term pollutants will not reverse global warming outright, but it is felt that the proposal can make a positive impact on reducing global temperature rise and on the health of those most impacted by black carbon. Moreover, the proposals in the initiative are low cost and require only modest initial investments.
The official announcement of the initiative can be found here.
More information on the science of short-lived climate pollutants can be found here.
A question and answer regarding the initiative can be found here.
