Will today’s United Nations summit on climate change in New York be another international ritual or a sincere attempt to address an urgent global concern? That’s the question. For too long, the issue of climate change has been victimised by the lackadaisical attitude of the international community, a truth reflected in the spectacular failure of the pivotal 2009 UN Climate Change Conference, commonly known as the Copenhagen Summit. As if this was not enough, the death of the Kyoto Protocol on December 31, 2012 — that sought to adopt binding obligations on industrialised countries to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases — further dashed our hopes. Given this history of neglect, can we dare to hope that today’s summit will achieve anything concrete? Will countries, particularly big offenders like US, China and India, move away from their political exigencies and commit themselves to an unequivocal blueprint for carbon emissions reduction by 2020?
For the UN to stress that this summit is less about talk and more about action and deliverables sounds good but the reality is far from reassuring. The truth is, globally, most countries are still heavily dependent on fossil fuels and cannot function without them. Investment and technological know-how on the use of alternatives, though moderately developed in some countries, is still not a grassroot implementable. The crucial Climate Fund, set up at the Copenhagen Summit to mobilise $100 billion (Dh367 billion) annually for developing countries by 2020 is woefully low on cash, with only Germany having fulfilled its commitment, leaving developed countries in a bind and developing countries at a loose end. Meanwhile, climate change, as signposted by scientists nearly two decades ago and predictably ignored by most political intelligentsia, is upon us in the form of the various weather-related disasters around the world. The threat of shrinking food production, depleting forest cover and small island nations’ death by drowning, also sounds anything but empty. Hopefully, the big players, as well as the other participants, have left behind their blinkers as they winged their way to New York to attend this summit and are, at the moment, fully absorbed in reading the writing on the wall.
