Joint Letter from WWF International and Lafarge

WWF, one of the world’s largest conservation organisations, and Lafarge, a WWF Climate Savers company and world leader in building materials, believe that a legally binding agreement to reduce global greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions must address the combined challenge of reducing global warming while encouraging sustainable economic growth.

For this reason, we support the international climate negotiations now underway with the objective of reaching an agreement that global emissions peak and begin to decline as fast as possible.

This agreement needs to be coupled with consistent monitoring, reporting and verification requirements to ensure that competitiveness is not disrupted and that the negative economic impacts of climate policies are minimised, while the positive economic impacts are magnified.

WWF and Lafarge support an agreement at the UNFCCC Copenhagen conference on incorporating ambitious, credible and transparent sectoral approaches into the post-2012 climate regime. We believe that, as part of a global climate agreement, the sectoral approach, if conducted properly, represents a crucial contribution to staying below the two degree Celsius threshold from pre-industrial revolution temperatures.

We believe that a sector-based solution in the energy and carbon-intensive industries should be a combination of different policies, including absolute emissions reduction caps in developed countries. For developing countries, sectoral approaches should contain substantive national emissions reductions goals, ideally based on best-available technology standards and expressed as specific targets for emissions per unit produced. As cement production, driven by growing demand in developing countries, is expected to more than double by 2030, Lafarge and WWF consider sectoral approaches as one of the most practical ways to achieve greater speed and scale in climate mitigation, within a global climate agreement.

Lafarge and WWF are ready to work with governments and national cement associations to facilitate sectoral approaches, to design effective national level policy measures to reduce CO2 and to structure enhanced technology development and deployment. Similar proposals are endorsed by other initiatives, such as the Cement Sustainability Initiative (CSI)*.

As part of its partnership with WWF, in 2001 Lafarge undertook, before the entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol, a voluntary commitment to cut CO2 emissions. These targets were more ambitious than those of the Protocol. Lafarge pledged a 10 percent absolute reduction of CO2 in industrialized countries, and a 20 percent reduction in net emissions per metric ton of cement worldwide between 1990 and 2010. By the end of 2008, Lafarge had successfully moved towards the 20 percent reduction goal by achieving a reduction of 18.4 percent, which translates into 20 million metric tons of CO2 emissions, saved annually through operational performance.

In addition, the companies participating in WWF’s Climate Savers programme are showing every day that an absolute reduction of greenhouse gases does not conflict with business growth. To that end, WWF and its Climate Savers partners, such as Lafarge, are showing the business case for climate action with their joint “Let the Clean Economy Begin” campaign**.By the end of 2010, Climate Savers companies will collectively have cut carbon emissions by an estimated 50 million tons since the program’s inception in 1999, equivalent to the annual emissions of Switzerland.

All it takes to reduce emissions is a legally binding agreement applicable to a vast majority of countries, allowing business to implement an ambitious climate change strategy. Lafarge, WWF and the Climate Savers companies expect that the Copenhagen negotiations will harness the political will that gives the world an agreement to keep global temperature increases below 2 degrees.

James P. Leape. General Director of WWF International

Bruno Lafont, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Lafarge

* The Cement Sustainability Initiative (CSI) was created in 1999 within the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), to explore what sustainable development means for the cement industry and identify and undertake joint and individual actions to improve the sustainability of the cement industry. The CSI today has 18 members, with operations in more than 100 countries worldwide.

**.See also: http://cleaneconomy.panda.org/