Beyond Kyoto

The report of the United Nations inter-governmental panel on climate change (IPCC) may not have unveiled anything that was not known before, but it has raised the decibel level of the alarm bells regarding the threat to planet earth. Extreme swings in temperature, unprecedented droughts and floods, the melting of sheets of ice and rising sea levels in recent years have all served as evidence that nature is no longer behaving as before. Though there are differences of opinion within the scientific world on whether these are admissible symptoms of climate change or just cyclical climatic extremes, they have visible and measurable consequences that mankind can ill-afford to disregard. For, should the sea level continue to rise at the present pace of 3 mm a year, it could have a perilous geo-economic aftermath. For India, a 1 metre rise in the sea's surface level would mean the loss of as much as 576,400 hectares of land, affecting over 7 million people, as reckoned by an Asian Development Bank study. What is worse, some of the coastal commercial hubs, including Mumbai and Chennai, would be among the first to face the brunt of the problem. On the global scale, the world atlas would have to be redrawn owing to the possible disappearance of several small island nations and the shrinking of the land masses of larger countries. What is especially unnerving is the hypothesis that plenty of irreversible damage has already been done to the earth's atmosphere. This is reflected also in the IPCC's observation that higher temperatures and rises in the sea level will continue for centuries, no matter how much restraint humans observe henceforth.

Apart from re-stressing the urgency for action on controlling global warming, the IPCC report should logically raise several critical questions pertaining to the efficacy of the Kyoto protocol on climate change, the only significant initiative that is in force to tackle this issue. The points to be pondered in particular include whether the emission reduction goals are pitched right and whether the clean development mechanism envisaging meeting emission reduction targets through carbon trading constitutes the right approach to tackling this problem. What is also needed is to revisit the role that the US, the world's largest polluter, has been playing by opting out of the Kyoto accord. In fact, such issues should have already been on centre stage as the validity of the Kyoto mandate is set to expire in five years. Unfortunately, little has been done to work out Phase II of this pact. Judging by the time that international treaties normally take to be hammered into shape, the putting together of a post-Kyoto deal, too, is unlikely to be a quick and smooth affair. This is more so because several uncomfortable and time-consuming issues have to be faced. These include, among others, the demand from several quarters for ending the exemption to the developing countries, especially the likes of India and China, from taking on emission-reduction targets. Should this happen, which seems quite likely, it is bound to reopen the entire debate on who should bear the cost of clean development and in what proportion. Since carbon trading has not turned out to be either an ideal or fair and transparent way of ensuring cost sharing, it would have to be suitably refined, or replaced with a better alternative.