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Climate Change

With the US refusing to implement even the diluted version of the Kyoto protocol on reduction in ecologically harmful emissions, the task of averting an imminent change in global climate has become all the more difficult.

International parleys subsequent to the Bonn meeting (where major concessions on emission reduction were granted to several developed countries in a last-ditch effort to bring them round) have also not made much headway.

All eyes are now focused on the Eighth Conference of Parties (COP8) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to be held in New Delhi in October. But considering the contentious nature of the issues involved and the economic implications of the clean development mechanism, the New Delhi meeting, too, may not be able to cut much ice.

Under the circumstances, individual countries will do well to take measures for adapting their economies to the changing climate. It was, indeed, with this end in view that India took the lead in initiating the process of building up a consensus - at least among the developing countries - on a common approach to the adaptation to climate change by holding an international meeting last week.

The involvement of bodies like the U.N. Environment Programme and the International Consultative Group on Agricultural Research in this endeavour has lent credibility to these efforts.

Irrespective of what happens in the wake of climate change - be it higher temperature, greater snow melting, more floods or droughts - the agricultural sector is bound to be affected the most.

Here also, the developing countries are far more vulnerable than the developed ones because of the higher share of agriculture in their gross domestic product (GDP). It is, therefore, in their own interest that the developing countries take on the developed ones jointly and decisively with a firm and well-planned agenda in hand at the forthcoming New Delhi COP8 conference.

Interestingly enough, a few of the proposals mooted at last week's meeting on climate change adaptation and which will be placed before the COP8 conference as recommendations have the potential to make the developing countries' task somewhat easier.

Since the developed countries have been the main culprits in vitiating the atmosphere by using technologies that are not environment-friendly, the meeting called upon them to pay for undoing the damage.

The forests and the vast agricultural tracts, including commercial plantations, of the developing countries were in any case acting as sinks and sequestrants for carbon dioxide and other gases involved in raising global temperature. The expenditure on adaptation measures for maintaining the sinks, as also for sustaining agriculture, in these countries should, therefore, be funded internationally.

Taking this argument further, the meeting also suggested that these farmers and planters should be entitled to compensation envisaged in the Kyoto convention under emission reduction trading.

If the COP8 conference succeeds in evolving the much-needed institutionalised international framework for developing climate change adaptation technologies and assisting the resource-poor countries in adopting them on a large scale, it will be viewed as an achievement.

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