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.