Editorial
Flawed Copenhagen deal 'taken note' of
The onus is now on the architects to lend substance to it
WITH the commotion generated by the just-concluded Copenhagen summit on
climate change gradually dying down, it becomes necessary to sit back and take a deep,
dispassionate look at events as they have been unfolding. There is obviously no way of suggesting that the summit has been a success. One reason for that is that the deal which President Obama brokered after consultations with China, India, Brazil and South Africa failed to take the views of other, more affected nations adequately into consideration. Another reason is that the very limited nature of the accord made it difficult to have it formally approved at the conference. Indeed, the fact that the conference president simply made it known that the accord had been taken note of was a huge indication of all the things that had not gone right in Copenhagen.
All said and done, it is now time to move forward towards doing the right things about combating climate change. One may not quite agree with UN Secretary General Ban-ki Moon, but he does make a point when he describes the US-brokered deal an essential beginning. There is little question that the talks in the Danish capital did not yield the kind of results people around the world expected it to. At the same time, however, they cannot be considered an abject failure, for the simple reason that they highlighted the massive degree of concern all nations have about the effects of climate change. That
climate change is an issue no nation can look away from was one reality that emerged from Copenhagen. The task now is for those who came up with the deal to inform the rest of the world (and that certainly includes Bangladesh, Tuvalu and the Maldives) how the money promised regarding
turning back the climate disaster will be made available to them. More importantly, the US and the
co-sponsors of the deal must now work out the mechanism -- technological help, technology transfer, et cetera -- that will help lift vulnerable nations out of the crisis looming over their future. Tuvalu is threatened with extinction and so is the Maldives. One-fifth of Bangladesh will be gone, thus increasing the
pressure on a country already engaged in several battles at the socio-economic levels. On another plane, the developed nations must, between now and the next climate conference in Mexico City next year, give out detailed plans of how the goal of
keeping global temperatures at 2 degrees Celsius is to be attained. The fact of the matter is that greenhouse gas emissions have kept rising. In similar manner, temperatures too have been going up and it is feared will rise to above 3.2 degrees Celsius.
The ball is now clearly in the court of the developed nations to live up to their historical responsibility to the disadvantaged nations to cut back on greenhouse emissions and help them adapt to climate change. They will need to bring substance to bear in their approach to the issue. For their part, the developing countries, especially the most vulnerable among them, ought to strive to enhance their negotiating capacities to have their concerns adequately addressed by the time the Mexico conference gets underway.
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