Climate change meets planned amid distress

Vibha Sharma

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, September 3

As a series of meetings take place over the next couple of months to combat climate change, major parts of the world, including India, China, Japan, Europe and the US, reel under floods, heat wave and super storms.

While there is international buzz about the urgency to prevent climate change from spiralling out of control, environmentalists say in spite of “these very evident and increasing proofs of climate change, official negotiations appear to be headed nowhere even to limit the damage to a median level, let alone eliminating it completely”.

A series of meetings, including a preparatory conference beginning Tuesday in Bangkok, are planned over the next few weeks before the UN climate conference in Poland around year-end to finalise rules for implementing the 2015 Paris Agreement on reducing greenhouse emissions and providing aid to vulnerable countries.

However, amid reports of intense events — heat wave in Japan and abnormal rains and weather patterns in countries such as China, Europe and India —worsening over coming years, environmentalists say governments are not doing enough to meet climate targets.

Rather, since the Paris COP 21 meeting, scientific voices have come down and negotiations are dominated by governments talking only of limiting rather than eliminating the side-effects of global warming.

“Official negotiations are going nowhere even to limit the damage to median level, let alone eliminating it completely,” says climate change and environmental expert Soumya Dutta.

“This even as there is enough documented data by the International Disasters Database and the UNISDR to prove that big floods and storms have increased by two-and-a-half times over past 40 years across the world. Floods in Kerala and Tibet, a rain shadow, and forest fires in California are a proof that intense weather events are no longer once-in-a-century but once-every-10-year event now,” says Dutta.

“If you see across the world, extreme weather events have already increased in places earlier unheard of. Climate change impacts are full blown and on top of it there are man-made causes — deforestation, badly-executed urbanisation, destruction of catchment areas,” says Chandra Bhushan, deputy director general of the Centre For Science and Environment.

After heat waves and extreme weather swept through various parts of the world this summer, experts are hoping that world leaders will be forced to act and meet the targets.

But while the aim is to stop global warming at no more than 2 °Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, current weather events prove the need for higher goals, says Dutta.

Apart from conferences, a scientific report in October highlighting the urgency of slashing climate pollution is also expected to influence the upcoming Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP24, marking the culmination of three years of negotiations since Paris COP 21 in 2015.