Timely steps needed to save the future

Overall this will be a much less costly economic development path for the entire planet, preventing potentially enormous costs connected with climate change impacts.

It will also be good for jobs, with many emerging from the construction of green buildings, low energy transportation systems and other climate-friendly infrastructure, as well as from natural-resources management.

The effort is undoubtedly long-term and ambitious, but must be seen as the eventual target so that today's decisions are taken with the long game in mind.

Climate neutrality may seem like a tall order this year with global emissions still climbing despite the growing penetration of renewable energy, improved energy efficiency in many countries and actions to sustainably manage natural assets like forests.

But some countries have already glimpsed the long term and are pointing their economies in that direction, from Bhutan and Costa Rica to Papua New Guinea, Sweden and Switzerland.

Many cities have become affiliated with associations like International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, an international association of local governments and national and government organizations that have made a commitment to sustainable development, and the C40, a network of the world's megacities taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emission. They are pledging ambitious long-term targets, some of which call for 80, 90 and even 100 percent emission reductions.

These pioneering urban centers range from Copenhagen and Stockholm to Oslo and Seattle.

Visionary companies, many of them household names in the Internet, high tech and banking sectors, are following suit.

The UN secretary general's summit at the UN headquarters in New York was about raising ambition en route to the Lima, Peru UN Climate Convention meeting later in the year and in advance of the UN Climate Convention meeting in Paris in late 2015.

In Paris, nations have agreed to ink a new agreement that can mark a turning point toward bending down the current greenhouse emissions curve and assisting the poor and vulnerable to better adapt to the climate change already underway.

But as the science spells out, this is not the end game, if poverty is to be truly eradicated and our collective goal of a safe and secure world is to be realized.

Only a long-term vision of climate neutrality in the second half of the century can do that and in doing so provide a real and exciting prospect for over 9 billion people of a functioning, fit and healthy world for generations to come.

Christiana Figueres is executive secretary, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change; Mario Molina is Nobel Prize-winning chemist and president of Molina Center on Energy and Environment; and Joseph Alcamo is executive director, Center for Environmental Systems Research at University of Kassel, and former UN environment program chief scientist. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.