Battered planet Earth may get a better and safer future
Battered planet Earth may get a better and safer future
By Ian MacKenzie
JAKARTA (Reuters): Planet Earth was battered by floods, drought and fire in 1997, a year which ended with the world's major polluters squabbling over ways to prevent further environmental disaster.
The 160 nations attending a UN conference on global warming, billed as one of the most vital ever held, finally reached a consensus on cutting greenhouse gas emissions through the next decade.
The climate was dominated in the latter part of the year by El Nino, an upswelling of warmer water off the South American coast which affects global weather patterns.
"I think for sure the most dramatic thing has been the El Nino phenomenon that has been experienced throughout the tropics," said Jeffrey Sayer, director-general of the International Center for Forestry Research (CIFOR), at Bogor near Jakarta.
El Nino, called by Peruvian fisherman after the Christ Child because of its appearance around Christmas, is being blamed for widespread floods and drought in the tropics, and has affected other areas as well.
A major manifestation of the phenomenon was drought-aggravated bush fires in Indonesia that spread a choking smog across large areas of Southeast Asia before badly delayed monsoon rains started to fall in late November.
Floods swept arid Somalia in East Africa, while the rain forests of Indonesia's Irian Jaya dried out and hundreds of tribespeople died from starvation and disease.
Apart from El Nino, eastern and central Europe suffered the worst floods in living memory in early July, with over 100 people killed in Poland and the Czech Republic, and many thousands of families displaced through the region and eastern Germany.
Consensus
In the ancient Japanese capital of Kyoto, a UN gathering of 159 countries finally agreed on cutting greenhouse gas emissions after 11 days of frenetic negotiations which in the latter stages pitted the world's two biggest polluters, the Unites States and China, in acrimonious debate.
"Perhaps this day will be in the future remembered as the Day of the Atmosphere," conference chairman Raul Estrada told the conference after a treaty text was passed by consensus on Dec. 11.
The conference agreed that developed nations should cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse" gases blamed for global warming.
The United States accepted a 7 percent cut from 1990 levels by 2008/2112, the European Union 8 percent and Japan 6 percent.
The conference accepted scientific evidence that heating of the earth's surface by gases trapped in the atmosphere causes more and fiercer storms, expanding deserts, melting polar ice and raising sea levels which threaten to submerge low-lying islands -- and some island states, such as the Maldives in the Indian Ocean.
The United States wants developing countries brought under the emission control umbrella and the treaty still faces a major hurdle in its passage in Washington through a potentially hostile Republican Congress.
Kyoto
U.S. Vice President Al Gore called the Kyoto agreement "a vital turning point", but echoed the EU's Environment Minister Ritt Bjerregaard that more still needed to be done.
"This is not good enough for the future... we would like the parties to be more ambitious," Bjerregaard said.
Indonesia's Environment Minister Sarwono Kusumaatmadja, in an interview with Reuters, said it was up to the developed countries to provide the leadership to guarantee Earth's future.
The Kyoto conference would at least provide a greater awareness of environmental problems, particularly as it took place in an El Nino year.
"But there is always a time lag between awareness and action, and I think that the time lag can be very long," he said.
He also condemned Western criticism of the environmental and conservation policies of developing countries, saying "market forces" were responsible for many of the problems.
"Basically, we are facing problems with the present contemporary civilization with its consumption and production attitude.
"The market is not friendly to the environment, and we are part of the market. It is too big a problem for us to handle... so they want to have their cake and eat it.
"They want to have their market and they want to have us perform as guardians of the world's environment without them having anything to do with it."
Business
The Kyoto conference also pitted big business against campaigners for the environment -- although major insurance organizations did offer support to the "greens".
CIFOR's Sayer told Reuters that a major development in the last two or three years was the emergence of major multinational corporations in the global timber industry.
"This is not necessarily a bad thing because those companies also have the resources to practice sustainable forestry if they are motivated to do so.
"But there is quite a bit of concern that they tend to go to countries where the regulations are least strict, where the profits can be made easily and where governments are the most susceptible to pressure to allow them to exploit forests in an abusive way," he said.
Environmental experts agree that perhaps the key issue of the future is water itself.
Despite various other problems afflicting the environment, "it is still water which is the main problem", said J.W. Taco Bottema, a program leader with the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific.
Much of Asia, with more than half the world's population, relies on surface or well water, with humans in competition with agriculture requiring the water to feed them.
"This is not a short term issue. This is a long term issue that will become more pungent and more strong during the course of time," Bottema said.