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Every country has a role to play in the fight against global warming
2007-10-26 09:33:27
By Emmanuel Kihaule
The fact that Lake Victoria, Lake Chad and some parts of River Nile are gradually drying up due to global warming is alarming.
This is because millions of lives in the world`s poorest continent, which relies on the natural resources, are consequently put in jeopardy.
Babagana Ahmadu, the African Union`s Director of Rural Economy and Agriculture said recently in South Africa that the water bodies are gradually drying up the due to warmer temperatures.
But has the world done enough to check the menace whose dire consequences are largely felt by the poor? The answer is absolutely no.
Actually, if promises and endless conferences on environment were anything to go by, then the Earth could be the cleanest and safest place to live in today.
However, most of these have proved to be big loads of hot air that drain resources and waste much time while the state of environment continues to deteriorate by day.
Everyday there are sensitization conferences, seminars or workshops at the end of which delegates would come up with a pile of resolutions for 'addressing' environmental issues.
Funny enough, the next follow up meetings could be convened even before any of the resolutions are worked upon.
The irony is that sometimes such activities, that most of the time are held in five star hotels out of donor funds, contribute more to environmental degradation rather than fighting it.
For instance, the Climate Change Conference in Nairobi late last year might have contributed more to global warming rather than checking it.
The planes that ferried over 6,000 delegates from the world over emitted so much carbon dioxide (Co2) and other toxic gases into the sky in a very short period of time than any other single activity.
Naturally occurring Co2 surrounds the planet like a blanket, keeping in the sun`s heat and making life on earth possible.
However, the burning of fossil fuels (oil, gas, and coal) pumps unnatural amounts of Co2 into the air, trapping heat in the atmosphere and altering its natural balance.
Hence, just like an extra blanket in a warm night during hot season, this is causing the planet to overheat.
As a result, the impacts of gradual climate change due to the increased temperature are predicted to be serious and widespread and they include more violent weather, shifting patterns of rainfall and dry spells.
Besides, global warming spreads tropical diseases like malaria, and the increasing El Nino incidents, rise of sea levels and rapid melting of ice such as it's now the case on Mount Kilimanjaro are also pointed as some of the effects.
Two researchers Prof. Mike Hulme, a climatologist at the University of East Anglia in England, and Dr. Jonathan Patz of the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland, USA, said recently that global warming was also responsible for the increasing spread of malaria in East Africa.
According to them, the rise in temperature in the region is the key factor enabling malaria to spread to new localities where people have low immunity to the killer disease, they said in their article titled Global Warming and the Spread of Tropical Diseases that came out in the issue of Nature magazine.
Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania have in recent years witnessed a dramatic rise in malaria infections, with areas which were previously thought to be malaria-free witnessing vicious outbreaks.
The current abnormal rains in countries of Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, some parts of Tanzania and west Africa, which have so far killed hundreds of people and left behind thousands homeless, are largely attributed to global warming.
The US is the leading emitter of greenhouse gases.
Countries of European Union (jointly), China, Russia, Japan and India follow the US in the group of big emitters.
China is the world`s second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, but as a developing country is not yet required to reduce its emissions under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
It`s important to note that the implications of environmental degradation are indiscriminatory in that pollution at one part of the world could have its impact felt somewhere else miles away.
This explains why countries as far as those in East Africa experience the consequences of global warming though they are not big polluters or close to where such pollution takes place.
The growing concerns over the rise in global warming necessitated the passing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, which came into force in February 16, 2005.
This was after over 55 countries, which produce over 55 percent of the total greenhouse gases, ratified it.
The Protocol is an international agreement setting targets for industrialized countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent below the 1990 levels by 2008-2012.
Each country that signed the Protocol agreed to its own specific target. EU countries promised to cut their present emissions by 8 percent and Japan by 5 percent.
Some countries with low emissions most especially the developing ones were permitted to increase their emissions.
The sad story is that most of these targets have not yet been realized and instead the amounts of emissions are on an increase.
The United Nations Organisation says that industrialized countries are now off target and predicts that emissions would be about 15 percent above the 1990 levels by 2010.
The Protocol suffered a massive blow in 2001 when the US pulled out.
When Kyoto was agreed, the US signed and committed to reduce its emissions by 6 percent.
Since the pull out, its carbon dioxide emissions have now increased by 10 percent above the 1990 levels, UN says.
US President George W. Bush said that his country had to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, because `implementing it would gravely damage the US economy`.
His administration dubbed the treaty `fatally flawed`, partly because it does not require developing countries to commit themselves to emission reduction.
China and India fall into this category, although they are two of the world`s biggest producers of greenhouse gases, they are exempted simply because they are developing nations.
Nevertheless, Bush says that he backs emission reductions through voluntary action and new energy technologies, instead.
Most climate scientists say that the targets set in the Kyoto Protocol are merely scratching the surface of the problem.
The agreement aims to reduce emissions from industrialised nations only by around 5 percent, whereas the consensus among many climate scientists is that in order to avoid the worst consequences of global warming, emissions` cuts in the order of 60 percent across the board are needed.
This has led to criticisms that the agreement is toothless, as well as being virtually obsolete without the US support.
Again, standing forests were not included in the original Kyoto Protocol and hence, despite deforestation and forest fires being the second largest producers of greenhouse gases, they are not included in the list of the major causes of global warming.
The rampant slashing and burning of tropical forests, for example, is second only to the energy sector as a source of greenhouses gases according to a report published September 14, 2007 by an alliance of leading rainforest scientists Global Canopy Programme (GCP) of Oxford (UK).
Figures from the GCP, summarising the latest findings from the United Nations show that deforestation accounts for up to 25 percent of global emissions of heat-trapping gases, while transport and industry account for 14 percent each and aviation industry makes up only 3 per cent of the total.
`Tropical forests are the elephant in the living room of climate change,` says Andrew Mitchell, the GCP head.
According to FAO`s State of the World Forest Resources of 2007, some 13 million hectares of forests worldwide are lost every year, almost entirely in the tropics and that deforestation remains high in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia.
In Tanzania, for instance, the energy economy is largely focused on collecting, distributing, and consuming biomass (wood and charcoal) to satisfy household demands for cooking.
According to a report by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) of late last year, as much as 90 percent of all primary energy consumed in Tanzania is biomass based and as can be expected, much of the demand for fuel wood is satisfied through deforestation.
No one knows why the Kyoto Protocol and other efforts to curb global warming overlooked this fact.
This is because stopping deforestation and resultant forest fires could be the cheapest way to address the problem as other efforts to reduce carbon emissions from industrialised countries continue.
`The focus on technological fixes for the emissions of rich nations while giving no incentive to poorer nations to stop burning the standing forest means we are putting the cart before the horse,` says Mitchell.
It's high time that right measures are taken against global warming so as to save the world from all the negative effects of global warming and as the GCP`s report concludes, `If we lose forests, we lose the fight against climate change and global warming.`
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