Agreement on Work Program for Climate Change

I am glad that negotiators from 163 countries have agreed at the end of the UN-sponsored meeting in Bangkok, which runs from March 31 to April 4, on the work program for the Bali Action Plan for Climate Change. People are hopeful that industrialized developed countries and developing countries can come up with solutions that both sides “can live with”, based on a common interest to deal urgently with the problems and the pressing issues of global warming, while the Antarctica Ice Shelf is cracking and disintegrating at this moment. Action requires the industrialized countries to stop the increase in global emissions within the next 10 to 15 years. and to dramatically cut back emission by 2050, said the UN environmental scientists. They warn us that failure to do so will see average world temperature increase over 2 degrees, leading to adverse effects such as food and water shortages, rising seas level and increase in extreme weather events. Further discussions will continue for a year and a half, to be concluded in 2009, at a major summit in Copenhagen, Denmark. Key areas that the government representatives will focus their discussion on are: human intervention to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emission; helping developing countries to adapt to the ravages of global warming; cleaner technologies for economic growth; and a financial package to help developing countries to find appropriate responses to climate change. A successor agreement must be ready for ratification three years before the Kyoto Protocol, which will expire in 2012, to allow countries to make its law in time. Climate change is a threat to us all. It is a matter of “life or death” for island developing countries. So we must pressure our own government to speed up negotiations to prevent future disaster.

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