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Time is ticking, seal the deal
In just three months, people will find out just how seriously governments are taking climate change threats
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In just three months, people will find out just how seriously governments are taking climate change threats.
Deal or no deal: The crucial decision is expected to come out of the upcoming climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December.
At that crucial time, negotiators will play a key role in determining how the world is going to respond to threats resulting from climate change.
The decision will also see whether scientific facts put forward by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its assessment reports and Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, which won them a Nobel Prize, really hit home or thin air.
During the landmark conference, which is set to take place from Dec. 7 to Dec. 18, negotiators are expected to agree on a new climate deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol treaty.
The Kyoto treaty is the only one that sets binding targets for 37 industrialized countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 5 percent below 1990 levels over the five-year period of 2008–2012.
In Copenhagen, in line with the two-year action plan adopted at the Bali conference in 2007, they are expected to agree on a new and comprehensive deal to take effect in 2013, the year after Kyoto expires.
But hope might stay as hope.
At last year’s conference in Poznan, Poland, governments agreed to shift into full negotiating mode this year to ensure that they will ink a historic pact in Copenhagen. Parties had even agreed that a first draft of the new treaty’s text would be available at the Bonn meeting, one of at least three meetings organized ahead of the Copenhagen conference, in August.
But the Bonn meeting failed to live up to expectations: No significant results came from it.
In fact, there were indications at the meeting that industrialized countries are unwilling to make substantial contributions to cut their emissions by proposing reductions of 16 to 24 percent by 2020 relative to 1990 levels.
In a report in February 2007, the IPCC called for reductions of up to 40 percent by 2020. Without substantial reductions, it warned, the Earth’s average temperature could rise by more than two degrees Celsius by 2050.
In a world warmer by just 1 degree, rising tides could submerge thousands of homes around the Bay of Bengal, hurricanes might begin hitting the South Atlantic and severe droughts in western America could cause a food crisis.
A rise in temperature of 2 degrees could severely impact the marine ecosystem, killing off a vast majority of the world’s tropical coral reefs. Stronger monsoons and flooding would cripple crop production, threatening countries with growing populations.
But with three months to go, it seems the governments still think they have all the time in the world and prefer the waiting game — seeing who is going to step forward first and take responsibility.
The game has been turned around from its main goal — to reach a global commitment to cut emissions — with industrialized countries now seeming to want to wait until the very last minute of negotiations for reduction commitments by emerging economies such as China and India before placing their own bets on the table.
In the process, too many “ifs” and “buts” are being placed on the negotiating table, dragging out the negotiations and turning them into a drama.
In the meantime, people, mostly in poor nations, are finding the impacts of climate change all too real.
The scientists say that the effects of climate change are becoming more evident, blaming it for more frequent occurrences of drought, flooding and malaria cases, as well as increased incidents of hurricanes and forest fires.
Indonesia is not free from the threats. A sea-level rise could submerge several areas in the country, the world’s second largest nation in terms of coastal areas, and would displace millions of people living there.
The facts are already too overwhelming for governments to simply ignore the threats of climate change. After irresponsibly dumping tons of harmful greenhouse gases into the air year after year — a practice blamed for changing the Earth’s atmospheric composition, resulting in increasing global temperatures that cause sea levels to rise — time has come to commit and do something about it — together, as one.
Doing something together certainly brings greater results than doing it alone.
People are tired of waiting and watching all the drama. And there is no need to wait until disaster strikes to take real action.
A failure to ink the deal will definitely mean a huge setback, not only financially, but also for the whole negotiation process, and more importantly, for people.
The Kyoto Protocol itself was signed in 1997 but only took effect seven years later. This time around, if negotiators fail to agree on a new deal in Copenhagen, it might take even longer for the world to really start working together to slow down the impacts of climate change.
Right now, hope lies with at least two remaining meetings — in Bangkok later this month, and in Barcelona in November — before the Copenhagen conference. If these meetings fail too, it is likely that the Copenhagen meeting will come to nothing.
The clock is ticking. It’s time to set aside differences, and seal the deal.
This column, which appears every week in the Environment section, features articles related to developments in the lead up to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.
