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ost-war Japan's film industry was famous for its artistic and morality-based movies that astonished the world. One of the most famous films, which also garnered the 1953 Academy Award, was Rashomon directed by Akira Kurosawa. The film tells the story of witnessing the murder of a woman's husband from the viewpoint of four characters.

Each of the four characters - a bandit, the murdered samurai, the samurai's wife and a woodcutter - has different viewpoints, perceptions, judgments and personal interests on why the husband was murdered.

And we, the movie audience, could not come to a verdict as to who is the real murderer. The film demonstrates that truth has many faces.

The global environment today is "murdered" by the disease of "global warming and climate change".

For millions of years, the environment has given life to diverse genes, species and ecosystems with fresh air, fertile soil, clean water and a comfortable climate.

In such a global environment, human beings came into existence to live and multiply.

Unlike flora and fauna, human beings have brains and the capacity to invent. Man discovered the power of energy in fossil fuel. Steam engines soon emerged.

Human beings were able to create "manmade environments", empowered by fossil fuel-based energy that ignited the industrial revolution. Nature creates genes, species and ecosystems. Human beings, however, cannot create but are only able to transform elements of nature, such as trees into wooden houses and fossil fuel into energy. But by transforming nature man creates pollution that is not absorbed by, and remains in nature.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned us that the world needs to stabilize concentration of CO2 emissions by 2050 at the threshold level of 450-550 ppm with global temperatures set to rise to 2.0-2.8 degrees Celsius above the average global temperatures of pre-industrialization levels of 1780.

A global temperature higher than this threshold of 2.0-2.8o Celsius will change climate, melt ice and snow in the North Pole and Antarctica, water molecules will expand and the sea level will rise.

This is not just theory. In Indonesia, we know these threats well. We have already lost at least 29 uninhabited islands. And we will lose hundreds more by 2050.

Like in Rashomon, we ask, who is the villain in this mass destruction of the global environment?

While the global environment can be considered whole, the contemporary world cannot. It is splintered into developed and developing countries, rich and poor countries, advanced, high-technology nations and the underdeveloped, low-technology nations.

And because of these differences in stages of development, the causes and the consequences of "killing" the global environment are different.

If developing countries must reduce their CO2 emissions level, the question is how far can they go down without jeopardizing their responsibility to raise people's per capita income, which is only 10-15 percent of the developed countries' income per capita level?

Developing countries can pursue a different growth path, which leads toward a low-carbon society, mitigating CO2 emission and adaptation to a new model of development with renewable energy, clean technology, desalination of seawater, heat-proof resistance rice seeds, hybrid automotives, low-carbon mass transportation, green building architecture, compact urban development - all new features of development that are based on alternative and low-carbon development technology.

But these technologies are available to the developing countries from developed countries only at a price in a free market that ensures the protection of intellectual property rights

Indonesia is an example of a country that has diligently followed the rules of the market eco-nomy in a political democratic setting. But experience has shown that external factors are always hindering the steady efforts of Indonesia to cope with poverty, political stability and environmental sustainability.

External factors, such as the recent international financial crisis, have raised the Indonesian unemployment rate. The need for free, open and direct elections has substantiated our political democracy, but at a high financial burden.

And Indonesia is situated on the "ring of fire", which provides fertile soil but with the added risk of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes that increase the suffering of the poor.

Based on these experiences, it is understandable that developing countries, including Indonesia, develop and adhere to the following principles for global development:

First, the recognition and implementation of the developing countries' position on "common but differentiated responsibilities";

Second, to accept developing countries' fair rights to utilize the atmosphere for development, especially to serve the poor. These rights have been used thus far by developed nations for their own development.

It is now our turn as a developing country to utilize the atmosphere for our development;

Third, that the overriding trust of the people in a developing country is that their government strives for poverty alleviation to reach a humane standard of life through global development;

Fourth, that sustainable development with low carbon and low poverty level requires transfer of technology and financial funding from developed to developing economies to indicate global solidarity to save our only one habitable planet.

It is within these principles that we must promote technologies and policies toward a low-carbon society and save the globe from its extinction.

Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama's initiative to pledge a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and ideas to bolster low-carbon technology transfer is an important step toward achieving the goals.

Other Japanese civil society initiatives, including the one taken by the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) and Asia Pacific Forum for Environment and Development (APFED), to name a few, in empowering stakeholders in developing countries to undertake research activities and effectively take concrete measures in the fields are highly appreciated.

Unlike the viewers of the film Rashomon, where the truth has many faces, we, as humanity, know only one undeniable facet of the truth, that the unsustainable polluting industrialization of the 20th century is the villain that has the ability to "kill" the global environment.

This unsustainable polluting industrial model must be changed into a low-carbon, clean-technology industrial development toward a low-carbon society.