The New Nation - Internet Edition

Mohammad Shahidul Islam

The climate change meeting held from March 31 to April 4 in Bangkok was fruitful in inventing a schedule for negotiations leading to a long-term international agreement on the issue, but actually inventing a harmony that all concerned countries will sign remains one of the most important challenges. The upshot of the first round of negotiations on a new global climate change agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol - set to expire in 2012 - was "a good beginning", commented Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)

The talks tried to make a pretty good start towards a finishing end. The participated countries identified precisely how urgent issues will be taken up for the rest of 2008, which issues will be judged at the three meetings that will come to pass during the rest of 2008 and which areas in the Bali upshots require to be further designed.

The Bangkok meeting was the first meeting since last December's milestone UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia, in which 187 countries decided to start on a two-year process of official conferences on increasing global efforts to battle, alleviate and adapt to the setbacks of global warming.

The Bangkok meeting also pointed out the emphasis of the next major climate change conference, to be held in December 2009 in Poznan, Poland, which will lecture to the issue of risk management and risk reduction strategies, technology and the key elements of a shared long-term vision for joint action in fighting climate change, as well as a long-term goal to lower greenhouse gas emissions.

The challenge ahead is "huge" while the Bangkok meeting was a success. "We basically have one and a half years in which to craft what I think is one of the most complicated international agreements that history has ever seen, with a great deal at stake from the point of view of different interests," Mr. de Boer said.

It considers that countries identify that failure is not an option in all of this. The impacts of climate change are being seen around the globe already today. Before the Bangkok meeting, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) released a report on the dangers to human health posed by climate change. Also, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) presented new findings at its meeting in Budapest, Hungary, pointing to increased water stress as a result of climate change. So this is evidently an issue that is documented as one that has to be dealt with at present, and has to be dealt with seriously.

The executive secretary-general sketched quite a few challenges that require to be addressed in the settling process, which is set to bring to a successful close in Copenhagen by the end of 2009. The first is the need for further and consequential engagement of major developing countries. The second obstacle is providing monetary resources that will make it potential for these countries to engage without harming their primary concerns surrounding economic growth and poverty reduction. Those finances will not begin to bring success unless major industrialised countries make considerable emission reduction commitments.

One controversial area at the Bangkok talks was expected to be Japan's proposals to include targets on an industry-by-industry basis for increasing energy efficiency, which was seen as an effort to pressure developing countries such as China and India to commit to emissions cuts.

'I think Japan is making a big mistake,' said Yurika Ayukawa, a member of the Japanese branch of the World Wide Fund for Nature, or WWF. 'They are proposing something that is rejected by the countries that Japan wants to come on board.'

December's Bali climate conference was considered a success because they got beyond previous stalemates between developed and developing countries as neither group was willing to take the first steps in committing to carbon-emission cuts. Bill Hare of Greenpeace International warned, however, that there were signs of doing a U-turn among developed countries in their proposals in Bangkok.

'What we're seeing is that Canada, New Zealand, Australia and a few others are putting forward very strong positions in favor of accounting for credits from agricultural soil or forestry activities that amount to loopholes,' Hare said. 'They are loopholes because they are proposing exemptions t they would get for regrowing wood on plantations, but they would not count the release of carbons from fire or insect damage.'