Human adventures in the name of human development have brought oppressive smog of carbon dioxide and burning fossil fuels aggravating green house gases and warming global levels. It has happened because of developed countries without any least awareness.The Impact
Signs of climate change are everywhere. Himalayan glaciers continue to retreat as the snow-lines shift higher, flood and landslides are triggered by unreasonable and erratic rain. Atlanta of the US remained submerged with flood water. Taiwan has been a victim of typhoon.
More than 200 million people will be directly affected and the damage is over 180 billion dollars.
On the critical observation of unusual climate change, a Russian visionary statesman once said: “the threat from sky is no longer nuclear missiles but climate dislocation.” The US is the greatest emitter of greenhouse gases and china is the biggest, if two countries do not agree on a common strategy, atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are likely to reach potentially hazardous levels.
The Hurdles On The Way
The December summit in Copenhagen took place at the end of the year aimed to replace 1997 Kyoto protocol- the first international deal on reduction of greenhouse gases emission- for its ineffective rules, methods and penalty enforced in each country.Similarly, the UN called on all the donor countries to raise up to 2 billion dollars to help poor countries adapt to climate change. But adoption is not the solution, rather, mitigation is.
According to UN general secretary, US president Obama may have had some difficulty to reach agreement in Copenhagen. It is evident that US republic senators and the democrats protested the president that they would not support the bill that would not protect the US companies from competition from other countries that were not incurring the extra cuts in carbon emission. Similarly, others blame the developing countries particularly India, China and Brazil to sign up binding carbon cuts. Also, despite agreeing that the developing world needs $150 billion a year, the European Union countries could not decide how much each of them had to pay. Poland is not as rich as Germany, England and France also have not emitted as much as greenhouse gases as the three. So Poland cannot be blamed to pay tax in proportion to their emissions. The same condition is applied for china and India.Face-Off
If the sea-levels rise higher as well as faster than the expected, Maldives may be swallowed-up.
Climate change does not have merely negative impacts. Nepal can take advantage of climate change by supplying clean energy like electricity produced through hydro-power projects. More importantly, Nepal can take advantage from carbon-trading.
The author of this article is Mr. Pankaj Kumar Jha. He is a professor of General Paper.
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