2°C warming under the current pledges submitted by national governments, which achieve only a third of the mitigation required to be on a least cost path to stay below that threshold. However, pathways towards staying below 1.5°C and 2°C are still technically feasible (Xu and Ramanathan 2017).
Although air pollution travels around the world, there is no single global agreement addressing air pollution; rather there is a patchwork of regional intergovernmental agreements (Figure 5.16). In general, this patchwork has good geographic coverage, but is uneven in terms of the coverage of pollutants, sources and capabilities. Furthermore, this patchwork does not encourage the transfer of experience and resources from richer to poorer countries. The oldest and most-developed among these is the 1979 Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP) organized under the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (Sliggers and Kakebeeke eds. 2004; Maas and Grennfelt eds. 2016). In the Russian Federation and Central Asia, the CLRTAP overlaps with the grouping of agreements under the umbrella of the Asia and the Pacific Clean Air Partnership. There are three regional agreements on air pollution in Africa which overlap each other and have a few members in common with the Council of Arab Ministers Responsible for the Environment.
Figure 5.16: Map of groupings of selected regional multilateral air pollution agreements
1979 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution (Geneva) 1998 Acid Deposition Monitoring Network in East Asia (EANET) 1998 Malé Declaration on Control and Prevention of Air Pollution and its likely Transboundary Effects for South Asia 2002 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution 2006 Framework Convention on Environmental Protection for Sustainable Development in Central Asia (Ashkhabad) 2015 Asia and the Pacific Clean Air Partnership 2008 Eastern Africa Regional Framework Agreement on Air Pollution (Nairobi) 2008 Southern African Development Community Regional Policy Framework on Air Pollution (Lusaka) 2009 West and Central Africa Regional Framework Agreement on Air Pollution (Abidjan) 1986 Council of Arab Ministers Responsible for the Environment (CAMRE) 2008 Intergovernmental Network on Air Pollution for Latin America and the Caribbean No agreements
