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Global CCS Institute joins United Nation’s Global Compact

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World Coal,


The United Nations (UN) has accepted the Global CCS Institute as a member of its Global Compact (UNGC).

The UNGC is an international platform consisting of many thousands of business and non-business entities spanning 145 countries to address climate change and promote clean energy technologies, among other sustainable development goals.

Being a participant in the UNGC will allow the Institute to more closely engage in the UN Secretary General’s Sustainable Energy for All (SE4ALL) initiative.

SE4ALL is the UN’s clean energy flagship, and it presents a key advocacy opportunity for the Institute to better inform the UN system on carbon capture and storage (CCS) matters.

CEO of the Global CCS Institute, Brad Page, said the Institute’s acceptance to the UNGC would provide the Institute with a new opportunity to describe how CCS contributes to the achievement of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals in addition to supporting the achievement of the ambitious climate goals agreed in Paris in December 2015.

“In order to meet the demanding targets of the Paris Agreement in the real world, we’ve got to reduce emissions from every possible sector of the global economy, and we’ve got to do it urgently and without bias,” said Page. “Globally, the energy sector is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions … This is particularly challenging for developing nations that are striving to develop essential infrastructure in a carbon-constrained world.”

“The UN system continues to rightly support renewables and energy efficiency, as adopted in its SE4ALL objectives, but it must equally turn its attention to addressing the emissions from thousands of existing fossil fuel assets.”

“CCS is vital to limiting these emissions, as well as those emissions that could effectively be locked into the future pipeline of power projects already approved to 2030,” Page continued.

“Even replacing unabated coal power with gas is insufficient for the world to limit greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to meet its own nominated targets. Gas-fired power plants still require CCS in order to realise their full emissions reduction potential,” explained Page.

The importance of CCS in tackling climate change has been long-recognised by the UN. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Synthesis Report, released in November 2014, highlighted the importance of CCS as a vital climate mitigation technology. Without CCS, the cost to avoid a global warming of more than 2°C would likely increase by 138% – more than double.

The Global CCS Institute believes achieving the Paris Agreement’s stated goal of ‘well below 2°C’ will require even greater deployment of CCS, in part because one quarter of the world’s CO2 emissions result from industrial process emissions for which CCS is the only technology that can deal with most of them.

“The Institute takes its advocacy efforts in the UN system and UNFCCC very seriously, and is demonstrating this by publicly committing to support and advance the principles of the UNGC,” said Page.

“We will continue to strongly engage in the UN system in the pursuit of evidence-based advocacy to represent the policy case for CCS in the context of climate change mitigation, concluded Page. “We are very pleased to be able to expand our engagement network to include the UNGC to complement our already extensive affiliations within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.”

Edited from press release by Harleigh Hobbs

Read the article online at: https://www.worldcoal.com/power/03082016/global-compat-2141/

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