Bali has again served as a silent witness in the tumultuous fight against climate change last week. But whether Bali will be able to prove itself as the only place where world leaders from the rich and poor nations are eventually able to reach a tremendous agreement to stop the devastation of the environment remains a very big question. Perhaps many will describe it as very unlikely.
Back in December 2007, the tourist island hosted a historic agreement for countries to ink a new climate change treaty in Copenhagen, Denmark, last year.
After the Copenhagen climate change conference failed to deliver a legally binding treaty — or even to set a new deadline to produce one — Bali has again chosen to host another environment conference, the largest one after Copenhagen, where disappointed participants were expected to kiss and make up.
But mending broken trust among the bickering rich and developing countries is not that easy, as had been demonstrated in Copenhagen.
As the host, the Indonesian government seized the moment by holding an informal session on Friday for all attending environment ministers and officials to discuss ways to ensure a binding treaty is inked in the upcoming climate conference in Mexico.
The informal meeting did put the ministers and officials back in the same room after Copenhagen, but trust is something that usually builds over time. The hope to ink a climate treaty in Mexico is simply beyond reach.
Lately, things are not looking too rosy for the fight against global warming. In fact, it has suffered heavy blows, especially with the Copenhagen failure.
Another blow centers on the controversy over several mistakes made by a Nobel Prize winner, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its climate change-related reports that had sparked criticism and even calls for the resignation of its chief, Rajendra K. Pachauri.
The latest hit came when chief of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Yvo de Boer, announced this month his decision to leave his post, as of July 1.
With a new leader set to replace de Boer only six months before the Mexico talks, it will be hard for him or her to make sure that a legally binding climate treaty would be inked there. Even de Boer has raised his doubts in Bali that a climate treaty can be agreed on this year.
The world may have to wait longer, probably until the climate change conference in South Africa in 2011, a year before the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, only if a deadline is set in Mexico.
With these blows, fueled with skeptics seizing the moment to raise people’s doubts against the science, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)-sponsored environment meetings in Bali came at the perfect time.
The three-day Governing Council/Global Ministerial Environment Forum highlighted different issues, from ocean, green economy to biodiversity, as shown in the Nusa Dua Declaration.
But from the very first day, it was clear the forum aimed to bring in more science and evidence to ensure that the climate change science was unharmed. And the studies presented at the conference did just that — sending out strong messages that climate change threats should be taken seriously and that countries should cut emissions deeper.
But so far there are not even little signs that the world is ready to be united in preventing global environmental disasters. What we are witnessing is more trading of accusations among the rich and the poor nations.
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