Global Warming And The Financial Meltdown
No commentsPoznan, Poland, December 1: The United Nations climate change conference, COP 14, began on December 1 in the western Polish town of Poznan amid concerns that the ongoing global financial meltdown will cast its shadow on the fight against climate change.
About 11,000 delegates from all over the world, including 189 countries, business houses, environmental organisations and research institutions are attending the 12-day United Nations Convention Framework on Climate Change conference in Poznan, Poland.
In a strong message, political leaders and scientists said during the opening of the conference that the global financial crisis will pass but the issue of climate change will be a permanent one.
During the opening of the conference, the prime minister of Denmark, Mr Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said he was confident that the financial crisis will soon be addressed. “On the contrary, climate change will only grow stronger [worsen], if we do not act now.”
The head of the UN climate change secretariat, Mr Yvo De Boer said, “Delaying action now will only make future action more costly.”
Chairing the conference, the Polish minister for environment, Professor Maciej Nowicki, warned: “Huge droughts and floods, and cyclones with increasingly more destructive power, tropical disease pandemics, and a dramatic decline of biodiversity — all these can cause social or even armed conflicts and migration of populations at an unprecedented scale.”
Bhutan has a five member delegation led by the director of its National Environment Commission, Sonam Yangley.
The negotiations on climate change have experienced many complications in the past. The United States has, so far, refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which is an international agreement to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases (GHG) and the world’s only treaty on climate change.
The global cause has also created differences of opinion between the developed and the developing countries over how to address the issue. It achieved a breakthrough last year in Bali, Indonesia, when developing countries agreed to reduce green house gas emissions if they received money and technology from the developed countries. With the developed countries entangled in the financial crisis, experts fear that climate change may not receive the attention it needs.
In Poland, delegates will also discuss their vision for long term cooperative action on climate change. Countries have submitted proposals for stronger actions.
“The fact that there is a text on the table offers governments the first real opportunity to move beyond the phase of exchanging ideas into one where they will be expressing their position on specific proposals,” said Luiz Figueiredo Machado, chair of the Ad hoc Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action under the Convention.
According to Harald Dovland, Chair of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol, the conference at Poznan needs to address the ranges of greenhouse gas emission reductions for industrialised countries.
The Poznan conference also comes mid-way to the two-year action plan, which was adopted in the last conference in Bali. It envisaged finding a new and comprehensive deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. The new deal will be one of the most important outcomes of next year’s conference to be held in Copenhagen, Denmark.
