Climate Change | 'Hot' Topics | On the way to Copenhagen: from words to action

On the way to Copenhagen: from words to action

Progress in negotiations on the path to the new climate deal have been recently achieved in Bonn during the Climate Change Talks held from March 29th to April 8th. Ivo de Boer, the UNFCCC Executive Secretary summarized results and problems to be solved in the final press conference*:

the short-term target has to be as ambitious, as the IPCC suggested, realizing a greenhouse gas emissions cut between 25 and 40% by 2020 by industrialized countries (vs 1990 levels);

China, India, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa have already significant mitigation strategies in place, but these actions are not adequately recognized by developed countries;

decisions by all developing countries to limit the growth of emissions require guarantees on funds to be allocated by industrialized nations to generate a “large scale stable and predictable financing on adaptation and mitigation”.

One of the most important issue remains then the availability of a lot of money for the most vulnerable countries to climate change: these are the ones with less responsibility for the current situation (e.g. Africa produces 3.8% of global CO2 emissions), but most likely, and already, affected. The Millennium Development Goals**, especially on poverty reduction, child and maternal health and environmental sustainability will not be met in the future if brave choices are not made, most of if we consider the complications and unpredictable impacts of climate change on e.g. food and water availability and quality. The geographical range of vector-borne diseases like malaria, cholera and yellow fever is expanding and there are higher risks of conflicts from population migrations caused by sea level rise for instance: this wide spectrum of impacts on human health calls for strong partnership between developing countries. Examples come from Africa where the programme Climate and Development in Africa (ClimDev Africa) is in place to tackle climate risks in the whole continent and the African Climate Policy Centre (ACPC) is going to be established by the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) in collaboration with the IPCC Chairman, Rajendra Pachauri. But agreements with richest nations are fundamental in economic and know-how terms.

Global and regional strategies are to be enforced with secure and constant flows of funds and in collaboration with the United Nations and its agencies. According to Margareth Chan, Director General of the World Health Organization “malnutrition causes over 3.5 million deaths per year, diarrhoeal diseases kills over 1.8 million and malaria kills almost 1 million people a year”. Climate change is a serious threat for these figures to grow in the next decades involving regions and people now safe from these diseases. If it is true that nations and people have to adapt to unavoidable effects, mitigation policies offer co-benefits in terms of lives saved from problems such as air pollution (indoor and outdoor): human health is to be helped also via pursuing environmental sustainability through systemic technological and socio-economic innovations.

The Copenhagen treaty can be a milestone in giving both humans and the other inhabitants of our fragile and beautiful planet a chance for a new era with less conflicts among people and against nature, but the Nobel Peace Prize is only the beginning of a long and difficult challenge for survival, though hopefully a good sign.

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