UN Climate Summit 2014: Connecting the Missing links By Sajid Iqbal The history of the Industrial revolution was commenced by the engine design of the Heron of Alexandria back in the 10- 70 AD. Onwards, various steam engines has been developed & manufactured by considering the design of the Heron since 18th Century which propelled the industrial revolution. Greedy people started digging coals from the mother earth to engrave the massive engines. We replaced the cattle with tractors, sailing ships with powerful steam propellers, horses with engine cars and so on! Eventually we became more materialistic and somehow more mechanized and technology dependent. Petroleum oil engine invention pushed further the so called development theory towards greater challenging situation. The revolution which we counted as a blessing, no sooner turned into a nightmare. People started facing unpredictable disasters very frequently. Researchers started digging the causes without any radar, but fortunately found a correlation between the increasing global temperature and increasing CO2 concentration of the atmosphere which is defined as the Green House Effect, the main cause of the Global Warming. Fortunately, various negotiations established a consensus and identified climate change as the utmost threat to the human existence. I strongly believe identifying a crisis and united effort is strong enough to address any mega crisis. The very first important conference on climate change was held at Geneva on February 1979 which was organized by the WMO. This milestone gathering led to the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by WMO and UNEP in 1988. Onwards, the IPCC produced reports advocated to form United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which is the first global climate treaty to “stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” which was held at Reo De Jeneiro on 1992. Various outstanding outcomes and agreements have been made to reduce Green House Gas emission but unfortunately, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is still linearly increasing. Now the global community has realized that, there is no option instead of practical actions to reduce GHGs emission and face Climate Change. Because of the urgency UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has invited the government, finance; business and the civil society to the UN Climate Summit 2014 which will be held on September 2014 at the UN headquarter. The summit will directly deal with the actions to address climate change rather than only negotiations. Already we have spent a longer period of time on negotiations but now it’s time to act smart and fast for our own survival. UN Climate Summit 2014 is not a part of UNFCCC negotiation process. It aims to showcase climate actions to the global leaders of all sectors and levels so that, they can visual what is possible today and beyond. Leaders from the government, business, finance and civil society is coming to join the summit on 23rd September 2014 and commit bold actions in areas that are critical for keeping the increasing global temperature less than two degree Celsius. This summit has specific eight prior areas: Agriculture, Cities, Energy, Financing, Forests, Industry, Resilience and Transportation. I am very optimistic about the action oriented outcomes of this summit as 120 Heads of State has committed to attend. The most important component: Action, which was absence for more than thirty five years in climate politics, will definitely take place through this milestone Climate Summit. From now this summit could make the climate negotiations more practical and worthful. Earlier, most of the climate negotiations were leaded by the state delegates and other stakeholders played the role as a pressure group, but now other stakeholders will play the most important role of showcasing the actions to address year’s long human crisis. As the summit is more focusing on the bottoms to top approach, it might be a sharp turnover towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals for a greener and safer world, the world we all want. greenmagz.info/un-climate-summit-2014-connecting-missing-links/
Posted on: Thu, 25 Sep 2014 19:11:41 +0000
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