Editorial
Saarc action plan on climate change
We need political will to implement it
THE issue of climate change in South Asia, we are happy to note, is today the focus of deliberations not just in the wider world beyond our frontiers but in the Saarc region as well. That becomes obvious from the action plan that experts from the member states of Saarc agreed on at their just-concluded meeting in Dhaka. It is now our expectation that the recommendations made by these experts will be adopted at the conference of Saarc ministers that went underway in the capital yesterday.
One need hardly re-emphasise the crucial nature of the issue here. With global warming having come to acquire a sense of urgency around the world, it is clear what the nations of South Asia must do in order to protect the future of their peoples. And these peoples, we might add, stand at a total of no fewer than 1.5 billion. What the experts' meeting has now come up with is a programme that should encourage everyone into thinking that concrete steps will finally be underway to handle the crisis. For instance, the willingness of development partners of the various Saarc nations to provide grants toward the creation of a regional climate fund is a sure boost in morale. It is now for the Saarc nations themselves to devise the ways and means by which such a fund can be set up and can be maintained through a regular augmentation of funds that will go into dealing with climate change in the region. However, the caveat here is that such an action plan calls for a significant degree of cooperation between Saarc and other countries in the region. That becomes important because quite a few states, other than countries in the West, have of late become known as contributors to global warming. Emission of greenhouse gases is a factor now also associated with countries like China and India. Efforts toward having them agree to a cut in emissions could likely be compounded by the thought that industrial growth, in their view, also requires to be carried on at existing levels. It is such problems that could hold up progress in the job of saving the environment in South Asia.
But matters do not have to be this way. With progress in science going on apace, ways could be devised to have new technology come in to deal with the problem, especially in countries that emit a high volume of gases. Meanwhile, a capacity building programme aimed at developing clean development mechanisms, as the Dhaka conference recognises, takes on importance. We expect a concerted action plan to emerge from the concluding session of the on-going environment ministers' conference.
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