#Article (Archive)

DO WE NEED TO WAIT FOR LONG TERM AGREEMENTS ON CLIMATE CHANGE?

Jun 23, 2015, 10:23 AM | Article By: Musa Manneh, Pamukkale University

The Bonn conference has past and some countries were able to table their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) which stipulated their plans regarding the measures they are taking to curb their greenhouse gas emissions. Some of which were encouraging but others were worth worrying.

What is wrong about cutting emissions for safeguarding our own future in a short term-than a long-term plan? Don’t our future generations mean a lot to us? We are only gambling for our global temperature not to exceed 2 from now as we struggle to keep the earth in equilibrium. What is the certainty of attaining this? Do we think temperature rise and other unforeseen phenomenon will wait for us until we settle our interests? Are we trying to heed this warning? The fact is that we are not ready for an absolute change.

It appears as if the Paris negotiations will face a lot of lapses. Despite knowing that the current carbon dioxide or the greenhouse gases present in the atmosphere will continue having impacts in the near future even if universal negotiations were to be adopted today.

This is why prevention of climate change may not stand to be an appropriate term as of now but we use the term mitigation.

The challenge now should be the way we can decarbonise the globe by technical means, improve on clean and efficient energy.

It is a fact that the energy industry is holding the backbone of employment of so many countries but this can still be maintained with clean energy.

If we develop our energy efficiencies we will be able to attain better economies, health and the chances of global climatic disasters will be reduced.

We still urge governments to come up with more suitable Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) for the benefit of our future generations because it won’t be fair to start a miserable future for them.

I believe that we should prepare for adaptation from now in order to merge with future challenges of global temperatures and consequences but I am very certain that the extent of severity of the global temperatures can be predicted for now but how it will greatly affect the people cannot be guaranteed by any scientist. Therefore, as prevention is better than cure, it is high time we looked for better strategies.

Every living organism including us the humans have a limit of tolerance to every environmental change and when we reach our tolerance limit we may not be able withstand or survive the impacts like the way we are thinking at this current situation.

Therefore, in order not to live in probabilities, I think it is better that we work on certainties of reducing greatly our greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible that can overcome severity of the uncertainties.

There is no discovered mechanism of patching the ozone layer yet; we struggle for continuous emission of our greenhouse gases.

It means all the MDG goals are likely to fail when we fail to solving the problems of climate change.

It has the extent of jeopardising our human security, environment, heath, economy as the list goes on in naming.

We still live in a bleak future unless a positive dimension is searched collaboratively but we are not hopeless.

We count on every nation to rethink about what is favourable to the globe and make sure that Paris conference becomes a turning point from where we can start putting the long stayed unsolved theories into visible actions.

While we still waiting for a remarkable achievement from the coming climate negotiations in Paris, developed countries still need to provide more financial, technical and other assistance to nations in other to implement on activities that are climate friendly such as the extension of forest regions by tree-planting exercise, creation of local community sensitization as the action of climate change calls for all participation from all angles of the globe. Industrial temperatures will continue to rise; hence more discussion is needed to settle this matter before further consequences will be too late for solving.