The leaders of the world’s biggest polluting nations said on July 9 they had agreed to limit global warming to within two degrees centigrade to prevent catastrophic climate change. Developed and developing nations “for the first time acknowledged the significance of the two degrees,” US President Barack Obama said.
The landmark deal was approved in the central Italian city of L’Aquila by the heads of state and government of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United States, Brazil, China, India, Mexico, South Africa, Australia, Indonesia and South Korea.
On July 8, Group of Eight (G8) leaders gave their first formal endorsement to the two-degree goal long advocated by scientists. To reach this objective, they said world emissions should be halved by 2050 and pledged to cut their pollution by 80 percent by the same deadline.
Scientists have repeatedly warned that if the world’s average temperature rises by more than two degrees when compared to their pre-industrial levels, it will cause catastrophic changes to global weather patterns, triggering widespread storms, flooding, droughts and famines.
After clinching a deal at G8 level on July 8, the meeting’s host, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, called on major developing nations to endorse those goals as the foundations of an international deal on fighting climate change at United Nations talks planned for December in Copenhagen.
However, while heads of state and government from the 16-nation bloc formally endorsed the G8’s goal in L’Aquila, no deal was expected on specific greenhouse gas emission cuts by the MEF during the talks on July 9.
Sources close to the negotiations nevertheless hailed the breakthrough as “the start of joint progress” that should facilitate a deal in Copenhagen, Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) reported. Environmentalists welcomed the move, noting that this was the first time that China and India - two of the world’s biggest polluters - had accepted the 2-degrees goal. But they expressed disappointment at the fact that no targets for greenhouse gas emission cuts would be set. “It is an indication that the leaders are taking climate change seriously, but not yet seriously enough to also commit to the immediate and mid-term action needed for emission reductions,” said Kim Carstensen of WWF, a pressure group. Carstensen said there was “general disappointment among big emerging economies with the level of ambition shown so far in terms of emission reductions from developed countries.” And “while it would not be fair for one block to go the whole way before the other budged at all, we need to see more convincing signals from developed countries before we can expect China and India to budge,” he said.
Denmark was also attending the talks in L’Aquila as host of the UN conference in December, which will seek to find a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions.
Meanwhile, a report from a world-wide consortium of research institutes outlining a strategy to avert an otherwise imminent failure in climate policy was published by the London School of Economics and Political Science’s Mackinder Programme and the Institute for Science, Innovation & Society at the University of Oxford on July 7. 
How to Get Climate Policy Back on Course argues that the only policies that will work are those which focus directly on improvement in energy efficiency and the decarbonisation of energy supply (called the “Kaya Direct” Approach in the report) rather than on emissions, which is an outcome of these processes. 
Professor Gwyn Prins from LSE and the report’s coordinating author said that, “Worthwhile policy builds upon what we know works and upon what is feasible rather than trying to deploy never-before implemented policies through complex institutions requiring a hitherto unprecedented and never achieved degree of global political alignment.”
The report argues that the recent Japanese “Mamizu” climate strategy is the world’s first to start down this real world course in sharp contrast to the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, the UK Climate Change Act and the US Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade legislation. Professor Steve Rayner, Director of InSIS at the University of Oxford, said: “The world has centuries of experience in decarbonising its energy supply and Japan has led the world in policy-driven improvements in energy efficiency. These are the models to which we ought to be looking.”
The paper’s twelve co-authors come from leading research institutes in Europe (England, Germany, Finland), North America (Canada, US) and Asia (Australia, Japan).
“These are confusing times for anyone interested in global climate policy. Currently, huge institutional and diplomatic effort is being expended as the world moves quickly toward a major international meeting in Copenhagen in December. But the best case outcome being predicted is merely more of the symbolic exhortation that has characterised climate policy for almost two decades,” Prins said.
The report points out that between 1990 and 2000 the carbon intensity of the global economy was 0.27 tonnes for every additional USD 1000 of GDP. In the period 2001 to 2006 this rose to 0.53.
Prins said that in the real world, “indicators are moving stubbornly in the wrong direction. The world has been re-carbonising, not de-carbonising. The evidence is that the Kyoto Protocol and its underlying approach have had and are having no meaningful effect whatsoever.”