UN Chronicle | Recent Trends in Climate Change

Recent Trends in Climate Change

New Delhi Conference on Climate Change

The Eighth Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change concluded in New Delhi, India, with 185 countries adopting the Delhi Ministerial Declaration on climate change and sustainable development. The Declaration asserts that in addition to mitigation, high priority must be given to adapting to the adverse impacts of climate change.

The New Delhi Conference adopted a number of decisions on institutions and procedures of the Kyoto Protocol, expected to enter into force in 2003, which commits developed countries to reducing overall emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases during 2008-2012. A major accomplishment was making the Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) fully operational. By channelling private-sector investment into emission reduction projects in developing countries, CDM will promote sustainable development while offering industrialized countries credits against their Kyoto targets.

The Conference concluded three years of work on the procedures for reporting and reviewing emissions data from developed countries. The result is an unprecedented international system for ensuring that national data on greenhouse gas emissions are comparable and credible. This is vital for safeguarding the integrity of the Kyoto agreement and promoting compliance with its emissions targets.

"The New Delhi Conference has achieved its main goals of further strengthening international collaboration on climate change while meeting the requirements of sustainable development", said Joke Waller-Hunter, the Convention's Executive Secretary (see UN Chronicle, Issue 3, 2002). "Now the spotlight must focus on action to accelerate the transitions to climate friendly economies. Industrialized countries have only ten years to reach their Kyoto emissions targets—and the evidence today is that most of them still have a great deal of work to do to reduce their greenhouse gases", she said.

—Sanjay Sethi for the Chronicle

Monitoring From Mountains

A United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) initiative will use its unique network of biosphere reserves to monitor global climate change. Home to some 500 million people, mountain areas are also the source of water for more than half of the world's population. "Mountain biosphere reserves are ideal natural research centres for studying global change and monitoring its effects on the socio-economic conditions of mountain people", said UNESCO Director- General Koïchiro Matsuura.

Mountains are extremely sensitive to global change. One dramatic sign is that glaciers on most mountains are melting. The snow-capped peak of Mount Kilimanjaro in the United Republic of Tanzania has since 1912 lost some 82 per cent of its permafrost, a third of this in the past two decades. Glaciers in mountain ranges around the world, from the Alps to the Andes and the Urals to the Rockies, tell a similar tale.

The new project is being carried out in partnership with the scientific community through a number of existing programmes, including the Mountain Research Initiative based in Berne, Switzerland, the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change, and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. With these partners, UNESCO is selecting biosphere reserve sites from each of the major mountainous regions as the focus for this new global climate change monitoring programme.

Disaster Toll in Billions

The financial toll from natural catastrophes worldwide could top $70 billion by the end of 2002, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has said.

Releasing findings of a study conducted by a re-insurance company, Munich Re, which is part of the agency's Finance Initiative, UNEP told the New Delhi Conference on Climate Change that there had been over 500 major natural disasters in 2002, killing thousands of people, rendering hundreds of thousands homeless and affecting millions of others. The disasters had cost countries about $56 billion during the first three quarters of this year. The bill comes as a result of record-breaking rains, devastating floods in Europe, the destruction of homes across the Caribbean and life-threatening mudslides in India, Nepal and Bangladesh.

"Climate change, linked with human-made emissions, is already under way", said UNEP Executive Director Klaus Töepfer. He warned that globally there will be a rise in extreme weather events impacting "every facet of life", including agriculture, health, water supplies and the natural environment.

"It will be the poorer parts of the world, the poorer people, who will suffer most because they have neither the financial or other resources to cope", Mr. Töepfer said, calling on industrialized nations to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, which contains binding targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. He also urged broader efforts "to help the poorer parts of the world adapt, to help them cope with the more unstable and more extreme environments likely in the coming decades".

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