About 200 countries are participating in the the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, which began in Paris on November 30. The leaders included President Barack Obama of the United States, President Xi Jinping of China and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of india. All these three countries are major contributors to pollution of the globe.

As a result of widespread degradation of environment in the form of trillions of tons of melting ice, a rise in the sea level by a couple of inches, droughts in many parts of the world, heat wave, monster storms, devastating floods, forest fires, and a series of tornadoes have endangered the planet. Over and above, overpopulation, desertification, deforestation and endangered species pose environment problem too.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate change (UNFCCC) in Rio de Janeiro conference in June of 1992, also known as the Earth Summit, adopted a resolution to stabilise atmospheric concentration of Greenhouse gases at a level that would prevent dangerous interference with the climate. This was followed by another climate summit in Kyoto in Japan on December 11 of 1997. The Kyoto protocol planned to reduce Greenhouse gas emissions on a global scale. Industrialised countries were committed to stabilisation or reduction of 5 per cent in their emissions from 2008 to 2012.

Biggest polluter, the United States, under the leadership of President George W. Bush, had walked out of the Kyoto protocol. Another international summit on climate change took place in Copenhagen in 2009. The Copenhagen accord agreed to stabilise Greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system while agreeing to reduce global emissions to hold the increase in global temperature below 2 degree Celsius.

Despite the adoption of binding agreement in two significant international conferences, there has been no improvement of global climate. Extreme hot weather, burning of forests, melting of ice in the Arctic, flooding and less snowfalls are major indicators of global warming. According to a recent article published in Digests, global climate has been affected as a result of temperature in the Earth’s surface which increased by 0.6 Celsius over the last two centuries. Most of the warming observed in the past 50 years is attributed to human activities, in particular to burning of fossil fuels. The current increase in global temperature goes beyond natural climate variability. Changes in the Arctic climate which has been recorded twice will also affect rest of the world. It may be noted that Digests is published under the Green Facts Scientific Board.

Therefore, the claim by most lawmakers of the Republican Party that global climate change is a hoax is divorced from reality. A glaring example is the United States. Hurricane Sandy, worsened by sea level rise in New Jersey in 2012, had caused more than $ 67 billion in damage and claimed 159 lives, apart from losses in business worth $ 30 billion. A drought is still hurting people in California, apart from burning of forests, including Washington State.

This writer organised a seminar on climate change at the BCS and Foreign Service Academy in 1993 for the benefit of newly recruited foreign service officers.  Presided over by retired Foreign Secretary Nazrul Islam, the seminar was participated, among others,  by Professor Kazi Zaker Hossain of the department of Zoology of Dhaka University, Professor Aminul Islam of the Geography department of Dhaka University, Dr Ainun Nishat of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Dr A Atiq Rahman, Director, Bangladesh Centre for Advanced studies, who was also a consultant for Centre of Research, Oxford University. They said that the problems of CO2 emissions and pollution are mainly the product of the industrialised world. They correctly feared that countries like China, India and Brazil would become big polluters.

 This writer also  took part as a member of the Bangladesh delegation at the UN climate change conference in Bonn in June in 1998.

The French summit meeting on climate change is facing problems from developing countries, led by India, to strike a binding deal. Being the world’s third largest Greenhouse gas polluter, Indian Prime Minister Modi said, “Climate change was not of our making and it is the result of global warming that came from the prosperity and progress of an industrial age powered by fossil fuel”. But the fact remains that one of India’s largest and most productive coal fields at Jharia in northern part of India has been burning for many years. It has become one of the longest burning fires in the world. Modi instructed officials to put out the fires before joining the summit in France to attend COP 21. Jharia is one of thousands of coalfields on fire that are polluting the climate.

For a welcome change in US attitude, President Obama is taking climate change very seriously. As the leader of the world’s largest economy and the second largest emitter, he by took responsibility to do something about it. Similarly, Chinese President Xi Jinping took up climate change seriously. It is very important for China and the United States to be firmly committed to the right direction of building a new model of cooperation.

Both the US and China agreed on November 11,  2014 to reduce greenhouse gas emission by 26 to 28 per cent by 2025 while China announced to peak CO2 emissions around 2030 and to increase non-fossil fuel share of all energies to around 20 per cent by 2030. Xi also announced during his state visit to the US in September this year that China would assist poor countries to improve climate change by offering $ 3.1 billion. The pledge by 19 countries, including the US, to double their investment by 2020 to $ 20 billion would help poor countries in making a transition to a new economic model that relies less on the use of carbon. Similarly, the US State Department pledged $ 248 million to help the world’s least developed countries (LDCs) not to rely on use of carbon. Microsoft founder Bill Gates also pledged to invest in moving clean-energy technologies from laboratories to market places. The US also contributes $ 10 billion to the UN Green Climate Fund to help less developed countries towards transition to cleaner fuel and to pay for loss and damage.

It is hoped that developing countries would follow the industrialised states in controlling pollution of climate because scientific research has revealed that the destructive effects of climate change have already begun to sweep the planet. The developing countries should join hands with industrially developed countries to find a binding agreement at the summit which will end on December 11.

Published in the December 5, 2015 Edition of the Financial Express