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BEIJING: The international community in 2007 mobilized to fight the
daunting challenge of global climate change, and has moved forward
from awareness of the critical issue to negotiations and actions to
face it.
With the rapid development of industrialization,
people are using more and more fossil energy, bringing not only
wealth but also a huge amount of contamination and greenhouse gases.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) issued a new report on the phenomenon earlier this year,
warning that the world’s average temperature, if left unchecked,
could rise by as much as 2 to 4 degrees centigrade by 2080.
This could lead to a lack of drinking water for
1.1 to 3.2 billion people and famine for 200 to 600 million people
besides endangering the lives of between 200 and 700 million with
floods, the report said.
It stressed there is no ground for doubting the
fact that Earth is getting warmer, adding that the rate of climate
change would accelerate if no efforts are made to reduce emissions.
Major cause
It also said human beings’ activities are the
major cause for climate change, which, if not controlled, will do
serious harm to economies, societies and ecosystems worldwide.
This report has rung the alarm bells for the
world, raised our awareness of the negative impacts of climate
change and aroused a worldwide debate on the issue.
Climate change panel Chairman Rajendra Pachauri
said leaders and citizens across the world must now pay
unprecedented attention to the climate change problem.
Since the beginning of 2007, a series of
high-level international conferences have made climate change one of
their key topics to echo the sounding alarm.
Climate change was at the top of the agenda of
the G-8 summit in Germany in June, a UN climate meeting in New York
and the APEC meeting in Sydney, both in September, the East Asian
Summit in Singapore and the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting
in Uganda in November.
Negotiations launched
Through comprehensive exchanges and
negotiations, many countries have reached a variety of consensus,
agreeing that negotiations on climate change should be carried out
under the UN framework, adaptation to climate change should not be
neglected, and technological development and fund input are key
factors to tackle climate change.
Although there are still many different views
between developed and developing countries as well as among the
developed countries themselves, the international community adopted
the Bali Roadmap on December 15 after two weeks of exhausting
bargaining and negotiations.
The roadmap, agreed on by more than 180
countries meeting in Indonesia’s resort island of Bali, includes a
clear agenda for the key issues to be negotiated up to 2009,
including action for adapting to the negative consequences of
climate change, ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, ways to
deploy climate-friendly technologies and financing both adaptation
and mitigation measures.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed his
welcome of the outcome of the climate-change conference, saying the
Bali Agenda achieves three objectives: launching negotiations on a
global climate change agreement, agreeing to an agenda for the
negotiations, and agreeing to complete them by 2009.
He believes the Bali Roadmap is a pivotal first
step toward an agreement that can address the threat of climate
change.
Actions wanted
Although a roadmap has been made and consensus
reached by the parties involved, there are many difficulties to be
faced in implementing the roadmap and more actions are desperately
needed.
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change said, “We now have
a roadmap; we have an agenda and we have a deadline.”
“But we also have a huge task ahead of us and
time to reach agreement is extremely short. So, we need to move
quickly,” he said.
It is 10 years since the Kyoto Protocol on
climate change was signed. The protocol set up targets for developed
countries in emission cuts, but some of the countries have turned
back the clock by expressing their wish to change some contents of
the protocol.
The Framework Convention clearly pointed out how
developing countries effectively implementing their promises under
the UN framework would depend on whether developed countries can
keep their promises in transferring fund and technology to
developing nations, but developed countries have shown a negative
attitude toward the issue.
In 2007, China released a national blueprint for
tackling climate change, established the Office of the National
Leadership Group on Climate Change, and issued a variety of related
laws and regulations. It is positively making its contribution in
the global fight against climate change.
At the recent conference in Bali, Xie Zhenhua,
deputy head of China’s National Development and Reform Commission,
called for sincere cooperation and joint efforts among all countries
in combating climate change under the principle of “common but
differentiated responsibilities.”
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