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AT first blush, the four-page Bali Action Plan produced by the
two-week Dec. 3-24, 2007 United Nations climate conference in
Indonesia looks like an innocuous document full of verbiage and
technical jargon signifying nothing.
For a while, it looked like the Bali conference
was going to be an event for “climate tourists”—a pejorative
term for delegates to the conference (there were more than 10,000
from 187 countries) who do nothing and commit nothing but to gawk at
the beauty of the venue and the idiosyncrasies of its natives.
Yet, Bali is seen as a major move forward in the
world’s battle against climate change or global warming. It is
supposed to have produced a “road map” for a two-year,
time-framed negotiations that will produce a new climate change
treaty by 2009 to replace the Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012.
The Kyoto Protocol seeks to reduce greenhouse
(carbon dioxide) gas emissions to the level of 1990. Some 174
countries have signed the protocol.
The Philippines is the 117th signatory to the
Kyoto Protocol and ratified it in November 2003. Manila accounts for
0.3 percent of total carbon dioxide emissions. The United States,
which accounts for 22.2 percent of CO2 emissions, has refused to
ratify it. So does China, which accounts for 18.4 percent of total
pollution.
The Bali Action Plan is considered important in
many respects:
1. It forced the US to reverse its stand not to
support any agreement on climate change.
2. It recognizes that “deep cuts in global
emissions” will be required to avoid dangerous climate change.
3. It requires both the rich and poor countries
to take “measurable, reportable and vertifiable” measures to
avoid irreversible damage to the environment.
4. It acknowledges that evidence for the planet
warming is “unequivocal,” and that delays in reducing emissions
increase the risks of “severe climate change impacts.”
5. It recognizes that poor countries must take
“measurable, reportable and verifiable” actions “ in the
context of sustainable development, supported by technology but that
they need financing and western support to do so.
For other highlights of the Bali Action Plan,
it:
• Pledges to consider “policy approaches and
positive incentives” to reduce deforestation and conserve forest
cover;
• Funds pledged to World Bank to initiate
pilot projects under the banner of Reducing Emissions from
Deforestation in Developing countries;
• Seeks enhanced cooperation to “support
urgent implementation” of measures to protect poorer countries
against climate change impacts;
• Acknowledges that economic diversification
can “build resilience;”
• Resolves to consider ways of reducing the
occurrence or damage from natural disasters;
• Will consider how to “remove obstacles to,
and the provision of financial and other incentives for, scaling
up” the transfer of clean energy technologies from industrialized
nations to the developing world; and
• Decides to re-instate an expert group on
technology transfer to advise developing countries.
A subsidiary body will begin work on the Bali
roadmap as soon as possible. Views of the countries (parties) are to
be sought by late February, and the first meeting is in March or
April.
Further review meetings are scheduled with the
process to complete at the 2009 UN summit in Copenhagen.
Earlier, the US came under scathing attack from
its very own former vice president, Al Gore, the Nobel Peace Prize
winner for climate change propaganda. “My own country, the US, is
principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali,” he
told the delegates.
Gore urged the delegates to come up with an
action plan just the same, since George Bush would be out of office
by the time the agreement takes effect.
The US stubbornness could be because it wants to
pressure China to agree to cut emissions. China has become the
world’s biggest polluter since 2006 but, per capita, Americans
emit 16 times more greenhouse gases than the Chinese.
This year, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change had concluded that climate change or global warming
is now “unequivocal” or can no longer be denied nor ignored.
That is like saying you will surely die of cancer due to pollution
and there is little you can do about it.
“Average Northern Hemisphere temperatures
during the second half of the 20th century were very likely higher
than during any other 50-year period in the last 500 years and
likely the highest in at least the past 1,300 years,” the IPCC
says. Greenhouse gases are very likely the dominant force driving up
temperatures now, it adds.
Temperature rise was already likely to be
responsible for a wide range of natural phenomena that are being
observed around the world, the panel’s report concludes, including
rising sea levels, melting ice caps and a rise in severe storms.
If temperature rise is not arrested, and
particularly if it exceeds 2 to 3 degrees Celsius, IPCC warns, the
world could face massive species extinctions, widespread starvation
as crops failed in hotter climates and a relentless rise in sea
levels that would drown perhaps major parts of the Philippines.
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