Page 42 - Climate Control News Dec-Jan 2020

Wholesalers Feature
Pledge to cut food waste due to poor refrigeration
AUSTRALIA HAS JOINED more than 70 coun- tries that have pledged to cut down on food waste due to poor refrigeration.
The countries signed the pledge at an annual meeting of the Montreal Protocol which took place at the United Nations' Food and Agricul- ture Organization headquarters in Rome, Italy during November.
About one-third of the world's food is lost or wasted. As a result participants are seeking to develop better methods to keep food cold being stored and transported.
Poor refrigeration leads to the loss of about 9% of perishable food in developed countries and about 23 percent in developing countries, where millions of people suffer from malnutrition.
Australia’s National Food Waste Strategy, which was launched in late 2017, provides a framework to support collective action towards halving Australia’s food waste by 2030.
The parties to the Montreal Protocol on Substanc- es that Deplete the Ozone Layer are also meeting to do more work on the Kigali Amendment which was introduced to phasedown the use of HFCs.
Among the invited participants at the high- level roundtable discussion are Inger Andersen,
“AUSTRALIA HAS A STRATEGY AIMED AT HALVING FOOD WASTE BY 2030.”
Executive Director of UN Environment Pro- gramme; David Appel, co-chair of the Global Food Cold Chain Council and President, Refrigeration for Carrier, Dr Liz Goodwin, together with a num- ber of national environment ministers.
Australian participants at the event included the Department of Environment director, Patrick McInerney, and Refrigerants Australia executive director, Greg Picker and chair of the Australian Food Cold Chain Council, Mark Mitchell. ✺
L-R: Cold Chain Council chair, Mark Mitchell. Refrigerant Australia executive director, Greg Picker.
UN emissions report points to a decade lost
CLIMATE ACTION NEEDS to rise at least five-fold to meet the 1.5°C target of the Paris Agreement as the world is currently head- ing for a temperature rise of over 3°C, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) has warned.
To mark 10 years of the Emissions Gap Re- port, UNEP has outlined the lessons learned during this period which it has labelled the lost decade.
The bleak assessment is sobering. “Despite a decade of increasing political and societal fo- cus on climate change and the milestone Paris Agreement, global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have not been curbed, and the emis- sions gap is larger than ever,” the report said.
While Nationally Determined Contribu- tions (NDCs) are at the heart of the Paris Agreement, a lot more needs to be done. Num- bers are currently being updated for the forth- coming Emissions Gap Report 2019 which will show global GHG emissions continued to grow in 2018, breaking the 2017 record.
“There has been no real change in the glob- al emissions pathway in the last decade. The effects of climate policies have been too small
to offset the impact of key drivers of emissions such as economic growth and population growth,” the report said.
The Emissions Gap Report will show that nations must triple the level of ambition re- flected in their current NDCs to get on track towards limiting warming to below 2°C, while at least a fivefold increase is needed to align global climate action and emissions with lim- iting warming to 1.5°C by the end of this cen- tury. For this to be realistic, new and en- hanced NDCs need to be agreed upon by 2020 and the implementation of existing actions accelerated, the report said.
The 2018 report documents the rapid in- crease in the number of actors participating in climate action: more than 7,000 cities from 133 countries and 245 regions from 42 countries, along with more than 6,000 companies with at least $US36 trillion in revenue, have pledged mitigation action.
While increased participation will help, the report concludes that a continuation of cur- rent policies would lead to a global mean tem- perature rise of between 3.4°C and 3.7°C by 2100 relative to pre-industrial levels.
CLIMATECONTROLNEWS.COM.AU
42