Domestic Affairs

Climate issue goes beyond borders

By Huang Shuo (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2010-12-08 13:43

Severe temperature changes in the past few years have posed a new round of challenges, causing people to reconsider their lifestyles and reliance on energy resources such as coal and oil that have been blamed for climate change. For China, the climate change issue is especially challenging for a country with the fastest growing economy and a huge population of more than 1.3 billion.

Climate change may aggravate the drought in North China and floods in the Yangtze River watershed, threatening China’s fresh water resources. Along with the warming, the average sea level is expected to rise, which will block economic development in the country’s coastal regions.

The international community believes that the current technologies can boost energy production, improve energy efficiency, reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and create alternatives to traditional natural resources. This is common sense by the world that coincides with China’s targets for long-term social and economic development.

Waiting and complaining can not answer the current tough situation. Progress saving our planet should be made by practical measures to prevent further global warming around the globe. Developed countries have more obligations to cut greenhouse gases. Increasing energy efficiency rates, altering the structures of energy consumption and reducing energy demand are big tasks for them. Developing countries are in favor of keeping international energy prices at a low level beneficial to utilization of crude oil and natural gas for economic development. There will also be positive effects of the supply-push and demand-pull that will lead to developed countries bringing low-carbon technologies to developing nations.

However, some developed nations such as members of the European Union hope that developing countries will mitigate greenhouse gas emissions by raising environmental criteria. The consequence may be creation of a new “green barricade” enlarging the export threshold for developing nations, but doing harm to efforts to restrain trade protectionism in the global market.

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is one of the major measures to emerge from the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement linked to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Its major feature is that it sets binding targets for 37 industrialized countries and the European community for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The CDM has been recognized by a majority of developed countries as a significant way to realize carbon emission reduction goals at a low cost.

Some developing countries, including China, also think that the CDM can become an effective channel of fulfilling substantial assignments in capital and technologies on low-carbon economy to developing countries in the context of the Kyoto Protocol. As a result, all members of the international community have no disagreement with the CDM.

Reducing greenhouse gas is closely associated with the daily life of the people. Whether people are from developed or developing countries, they should join hands to settle our joint challenge: climate change. Saving the earth without regard to borders can be a practical slogan for the 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico.

The author can be reached at larryhuangshuo@gmail.com.