The United Nations today
launched the Decade on Biodiversity with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urging
humanity to live in harmony with nature and to preserve and properly manage its
riches for the prosperity of current and future generations.
It is now widely recognised that climate change and biodiversity are
interconnected. Biodiversity is affected by climate change, with negative
consequences for human well-being, but biodiversity, through the ecosystem
services it supports, also makes an important contribution to both
climate-change mitigation and adaptation.
After extended negotiations over the weekend, the 194 parties to the UN
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) agreed on a package of
decisions, known as the Durban Platform, which include the launch of a protocol
or legal instrument that would apply to all members, a second commitment period
for the existing Kyoto Protocol and the launch of the Green Climate Fund.
The 194 countries negotiating here also agreed that such a universal plan must
be completed by 2015 at the latest. For the first time, all major
nations—developed and developing—have agreed to a road map that would combat
climate change reducing greenhouse gas emissions to control global warming that
would not come into effect before 2020.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon welcomed last week the conclusion decision; he was
gratified that countries reached decisions to implement the Cancun Agreements,
which were created at last year's conference in Mexico. The new measures include
setting up a Technology Mechanism that will promote access by developing
countries to clean, low-carbon technologies, and establishing an Adaptation
Committee that will coordinate adaptation activities on a global scale.
The European Union said the world’s three nations that pollute the most are the
biggest obstacles to setting a time line to a legally binding pact on global
warming and that it won’t “cave in” on its demands.
Currently, only industrial countries have legally binding emissions targets
under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Although those commitments expire next year, but
they will be extended for another five years under the accord adopted Sunday — a
key demand by developing countries seeking to preserve the only existing treaty
regulating carbon emissions.
But environmentalists and representatives from smaller countries were
underwhelmed by the deal, saying the urgency of the problem of climate change
demanded a shorter time line for action. These people also said the deal could
be easily ignored by major economies responsible for mass emissions.
The United States never signed the Kyoto treaty because it did not accept its
division between developed and developing countries. Todd D. Stern, the chief
American climate negotiator, said he was hopeful that talks in coming years
would produce a more equitable arrangement.
It is pertinent to mention here that Asia was worse hit area due to severe
climate change mainly Pakistan is one of the countries that have been severely
hit in the recent years by disastrous effects of climate change including flash
floods and devastating earthquakes.
“Developed nations are not guilty of causing the climate change that developing
nations claim they are suffering,” said Tom Harris, executive director of ICSC
which is headquartered in Ottawa, Canada. “Climate changes all the time—both
warming and cooling—due to natural causes and there is nothing that we can do to
stop it. However, to the degree possible, and considering our economic
circumstances, developed nations still have a moral obligation to devote a
proportion of their foreign aid to helping the world’s most vulnerable people
adapt to natural climate events.”
Human activities have caused the extinction of plants and animals at some
hundreds or thousands of times faster than what the natural rate would have
been, Mr. Akasaka pointed out.
"We cannot reverse extinction. We can, however, prevent future extinction of
other species right now. For the next 10 years our commitment to protecting more
than eight million species, and our wisdom in contributing to a balance of life,
will be put to a test," Mr. Kiyo Akasaka, Under-Secretary-General for
Communications and Public Information, in the Japanese city of Kanazawa said.
Species can adapt to gradual changes in their environment through evolution, but
climate change often moves too quickly for them to do so. It’s not the absolute
temperature, then, but the rate of change that matters. Put simply, if climate
change is large enough, quick enough, and on a global scale, it can be the
perfect ingredient for a mass extinction.
We can’t tell the future of evolution, but we can look at the past for reference
points.