Climate change summit in Poznan: Is it another idle talk?

No concrete actions were decided in the two-week-long UN climate change summit in Poznan, Poland, which concluded on Dec. 12, 2008. No concrete action to arrest the alarming increase in CO2 emissions which poses a grave threat to the planet's climate balance. Added to these woes, is the global economic downturn as a result of the current financial meltdown.It would greatly affect spending on saving our planet.

The Kyoto Protocol required the developed nations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by an average of about 5% below 1990 levels by 2012.Needless to say, the Kyoto Protocol is going to expire in 2012 without any marked progress in avoiding the global catastrophe.

The problem of tropical deforestation, clean technology for developing countries and other important issues were postponed to the next summit at Copenhagen.

On the positive side of the current summit in Poznan, there were some promises. Mexico promised to cut carbon emissions 50% below 2002 levels by 2050,Brazil promised a 70% cut in its annual deforestation rate by 2017 and South Africa has began with a program to stop growth in it own carbon emissions by 2025

As usual, the Nobel laureate Al Gore’s speech at the meeting was eloquent. He thundered:”….. the old divide between the North and South, between developed and developing countries, is a divide that must become obsolete." This is technically correct.Since, today, carbon emission anywhere would affect everywhere in the planet.

it was true that the poverty stricken nations also didn’t keep their promises. But, what about the commitments by the North countries? The serious lacuna in the whole exercise was the vagueness in defining the division of responsibilities between rich and poor nations.

While the global political community is disunited on tackling this danger, the millions of people are suffering from the frightening consequences of continued inaction. Already the report of the UN's Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned about global warming, predicting a warming trend of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

The greenhouse gases already emitted into the atmosphere could put up to 30% of species on the planet at risk for extinction. A warming trend of 3 degrees would make millions of human beings at risk from flooding; the wetlands would be lost; there would be a massive die-off of sea corals; sea levels would rise by 28 to 43 cm; the possibility of melting of the Greenland ice sheet, releasing enough fresh water to swamp coastal cities, in the coming centuries.

Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC's chairman U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said last year.” What we will do in the next two, three years will determine our future," Already,one year has passed.

Putting faith on the global political classes is not enough. To pressurize them, the common people all over the world have to come forward.