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Climate change
Climate change is widely considered to be one of the gravest threats to the sustainability of the planet's environment, the well-being of its people and the strength of its economies. Mainstream scientists agree that the Earth's climate is changing from the build-up of greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as carbon dioxide, that result from such essential human activities as electricity generation, transportation and agriculture.
Climate change is widely considered to be one of the gravest threats to the sustainability of the planet's environment, the well-being of its people and the strength of its economies. Mainstream scientists agree that the Earth's climate is changing from the build-up of greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as carbon dioxide, that result from such essential human activities as electricity generation, transportation and agriculture.
They also agree that industrialized countries —those with very high per capita GHG emissions— need to reduce their consumption of fossil fuels, improve agricultural practices, and conserve forests and other ecosystems that absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Developing countries, whose per capita emissions are generally much lower, are concerned with meeting the immediate energy needs of their people rather than reducing their emissions, but the time is right for them to also begin pursuing a more sustainable path of development.
The international response to climate change started with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Agreed to in 1992, the Convention is a framework for action to limit or reduce GHG emissions. In 1997, 159 countries signed the Kyoto Protocol to the Convention, committing industrialized countries to quantified targets for abating their emissions of GHGs.
Under the Kyoto Protocol, the US - by far the world's largest emitter of GHGs – was meant not only to slow down but also reverse the growth of its emissions to reach a target level of seven per cent below its 1990 emissions. In March 2001, US President George W. Bush de facto reneged on this undertaking by the previous administration, which had signed the Kyoto Protocol. He declared that he would propose his own strategy, and not seek ratification of the protocol, because he was worried about its effects on the US economy. Instead, the Bush administration came up with its own climate change strategy: one that, by 2012, is likely to result in a 30 per cent increase, over the 1990 levels, in the emission of greenhouse gases.
Over the last years, the centre of the debate on climate change has revolved around the so called “flexible” clauses of the Kyoto Protocol. In order to persuade the developed world to sign the convention, the protocol includes a “Clean Development Mechanism” (CDM) that allows the emission of a generous quantity of GHGs provided that countries commit themselves to investing in programs that compensate for their contamination. Namely, these consist in forestation and the preservation of green areas capable of absorbing carbon dioxide and transforming it into oxygen through the process of photosynthesis: the so called “carbon sinks”.
Although many NGOs and international organizations such as the World Bank agree that this mechanism provides a satisfactory solution to all parts, environmental groups and green organizations claim that no real improvement on climate change will be made if there is no reduction of GHGs emission. Furthermore, many argue that the CDM in fact bargains the right to contaminate thus leading to yet another form of commerce: the “carbon trade”, which is far from tackling the root causes of the problem.
Despite the fact that the effects of climate change affect the world as a whole, the south is increasingly turning into the “carbon sink” of the north, which causes serious alterations in its biodiversity and hinders the possibility of sustainable development.
In recent years, several countries have been promoting the use of biofuels - liquid fuels produced from biomass grown in large-scale monocultures, also called 'agrofuels'- as a viable alternative to fossil fuels. Promoters claim biofuels provide significant greenhouse gas emissions savings, but environmental NGOs have increasingly warned that the rush to agrofuels encourages intensive, industrial agriculture, providing a new promotional vehicle for GM crops, and posing a serious threat to food sovereignty. Indeed, the destruction of rainforests, peatlands and other ecosystems to make way for agrofuel plantations may well accelerate global warming.
