The pledges that countries have made to reduce their CO2 emissions "fall short" of what is needed to reach a key target set at the Copenhagen climate summit last year, according to a study by the International Energy Agency.
The so-called Copenhagen Accord hashed out at last December's United Nations summit said the increase in global temperature "should be below two degrees Celsius," and many climate scientists say that failing to meet that target would have dire consequences for the environment. But the IEA says in the study that the commitments made so far won't be enough to keep the temperature rise to two degrees.
The news comes amid growing skepticism that the next big U.N.-sponsored climate conference—to be held in the Mexican resort of Cancún at the end of the year—can deliver a legally binding deal on curbing emissions. For now, prospects for a deal in Mexico look bleak, said IEA Chief Economist Fatih Birol in an interview. "Unfortunately, the wind is not necessarily blowing in the right direction," he said.
The IEA, which advises industrialized nations on energy policy, has calculated that all the action plans that countries have submitted so far won't stabilize the long-term concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million of CO2 equivalent—a level that would translate into a two-degree temperature rise, according to the agency.
"The pledges made so far mean 550 parts per million and result in a three-degree increase in temperature,"' Mr. Birol said. "That's much higher than many countries would like to see."
Some policy makers say a legally binding treaty isn't necessarily the best way to tackle climate change, and that the world should focus more on measures such as improving energy efficiency and investment in green jobs and renewable energy.
The climate-change world has been roiled by an incident late last year, when more than 1,000 emails taken from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England were posted on the Internet. Some of the emails suggested attempts to suppress or manipulate data. The center's director, Prof. Phil Jones, stepped aside pending the outcome of an independent investigation.
Through the university's press office, Prof. Jones declined to comment. In interviews with Nature magazine and with the BBC that were published in recent days, Prof. Jones denied cheating on data, unfairly influencing the scientific process, or seeking to censor or suppress papers that didn't support the theory of man-made warming.
In the BBC interview, he acknowledged a failure to organize some of his decades-old weather data, and said that had contributed to his refusal to share raw data with critics. Climate scientists, he said, needed to be more transparent with data, and do more to communicate their arguments that humans were driving recent climate change. He also told the journal Nature that Chinese data he had used for a 1990 article in the magazine may have been flawed—though he insisted the "science still holds up."
The comments by the IEA's Mr. Birol parallel similar efforts by U.S. officials to lower expectations ahead of the conference in Mexico, following the failure at Copenhagen to agree on a full blown treaty to curb greenhouse-gas emissions blamed for global warming. Last week, U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern said the Mexico meeting shouldn't be considered a failure if it didn't result in a legally binding climate agreement. These downbeat assessments have been fueled by increasing concern at the stance adopted by developing nations, particularly the so-called BASIC countries—Brazil, South Africa, India and China—, which together account for 30% of global emissions of heat-trapping gases.
Mr. Stern said last week that some of the submissions made by developing nations under the Copenhagen Accord on how they planned to cut their emissions "have been a bit ambiguous."
In recent weeks, ministers in India, who fear curbs on carbon could hold back the country's economic growth, have stressed the accord is a "catalogue of voluntary commitments," rather than obligations. The U.S., in contrast, is seeking to build on the Copenhagen deal to draw up a full-scale U.N. treaty.
"They're sending out signals—yes, the Copenhagen Accord is fine, and in some ways it may be a framework, but it's by no means a legally binding agreement," said Louis Bono, a counselor on energy and environment at the U.S. mission to the European Union, speaking at a conference in London. "We are going to have a difficult set of negotiations" in Mexico, he said.
Under the Copenhagen Accord, countries had to send in their plans by Jan. 31 for achieving the goal of a temperature increase of no more than two degrees, though the deadline was flexible and the targets were nonbinding. The accord also set a goal of $100 billion a year in aid for developing nations to help them adapt to and fight climate change.
So far, some 96 countries representing more than 80% of global carbon emissions have handed in their pledges.