|
|
CLIMATE CHANGE: Andean Community Pushes for Urgent Action
By Constanza Vieira
LIMA, Dec 6 (IPS) - Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela are at
once vulnerable to climate change and increasingly reliant on their oil and
natural gas exports, while their environmental management policies depend on
foreign aid and funding from the industrial powers.
The five members of the Andean Community trade bloc have taken a common
position to the 11th Conference of the 189 Parties to the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 11) and the first meeting of the
Parties to the Kyoto Protocol, running Nov. 28-Dec. 9 in Montreal, Canada.
"Climate change is already here. We can't expect to mitigate it, only to
take immediate action to adapt to what is coming. And (the Andean countries)
want money" from the funds contributed by the industrial powers to the
Special Climate Change Fund, Lupe Guinand, director of the Andean Community's
programme for Sustainable Development and the Environment, told IPS.
The Andean nations are urging that commitments be made at once for the
period following 2012, when the provisions of the Kyoto Protocol expire.
That treaty, which entered into force in February of this year, obliges the
industrialised signatories - all of the world's industrialised nations with
the exception of Australia and the United States - to reduce their emissions
of greenhouse gases by 2012, to volumes 5.2 percent lower than those emitted
in 1990.
After 2012, climate change commitments are to encompass developing countries
as well, especially emerging powers like China, India and Brazil.
The scientific community agrees that accumulation in the atmosphere of
greenhouse gases such as those released by the burning of oil, coal and gas
is linked to global warming and climate change.
In the present negotiations, the Andean Community nations are also insisting
that the increase in frequency and impact of climate-related disasters is
directly linked to global climate change.
"We can't say what percentage of a hurricane is directly related to climate
change, but we have to start looking at it from that angle," said Guinand.
A regional study by the Andean Community based on the "national
communications" containing emission inventories that all parties to the
climate change convention must submit listed the areas most affected in
these countries, which included food security, availability of drinking
water, hydropower generation, and tropical diseases which are becoming more
and more widespread in geographic terms as the average temperature rises.
The study also mentions the impact on strategic ecosystems such as forests,
biological corridors, wetlands and mountainous areas, and specific damage to
Amazonian rainforest, glaciers, and river basins.
In addition, it points to the increase in climate-related disasters
occurring in the region.
The Lima newspaper El Comercio published a report last Thursday by the
Peruvian Ministry of Agriculture according to which in the northern
department (province) of Ancash, 14,000 head of cattle have died in the last
two years, and 6,700 hectares of crops have been lost, because of drought.
"Entire villages in the (northern) mountains of Piura don't even have water
to slake their thirst," the newspaper reported, while the meteorological
service warned about heavy rains this weekend in another part of the
country.
The "El Niño" climate phenomenon (an ocean current that periodically warms
the surface water in the central tropical Pacific ocean) caused losses and
damages in 1998 equivalent to 4.5 percent of Peru's gross domestic product
(GDP), according to the Andean Development Corporation, the financial arm of
the Andean Community.
"From a total of 250 catastrophes in 1995, we climbed to 1,300 in 2003," of
which 72 percent were attributable to the climate, the National Council for
the Environment reported in its turn.
The Andean Community nations all encompass part of the Amazon jungle. The
trade bloc, which is bordered by the Pacific ocean and the Caribbean sea, is
home to one-quarter of the planet's biodiversity, although it occupies only
three percent of the world's land surface.
With the exception of Venezuela, classified as "medium-high" in regard to
risk from climate change, the other four countries in the bloc are deemed to
be at high risk, according to Guinand.
The proportion of greenhouse gases emitted by the Andean nations is only
0.28 to 1.12 percent of the total produced by industrialised countries,
while the bloc's "quota" is not supposed to exceed 4.00 percent of the
industrialised countries' emissions, or 2.5 percent of global emissions.
The bloc thus has enormous potential for projects aimed at mitigating
climate change, such as planting and preserving forests that absorb carbon
dioxide (the main greenhouse gas).
At the same time, the region is heavily dependent on the exportation of oil
and natural gas, which are major sources of carbon dioxide and pollutants.
Minerals and oil and gas constitute 52 percent of the five countries' total
exports. Hydrocarbons account for nearly 30 percent, "although mineral
extraction also consumes a great deal of petroleum," Ricardo Giesecke, an
Andean Community energy expert, told IPS.
On average the Andean nations allocate three percent of the official
development aid they receive from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD) to the environment, but the amount available for
tackling climate change is small and shrinking.
Andean environmental management depends on foreign aid, and is not a
priority for any of the region's governments.
"The Andean Community's trade ministers have refused for decades to discuss
environmental issues (within the community), because they believe that
looking after the environment is an obstacle to trade," Guinand said.
"Environmental institutions are weak, and legislation, although it has made
progress in the last 10 years, is barely enforced, (while) control and
monitoring measures are inadequate," according to another document which
analyses the environmental chapter of the negotiations for a free trade
agreement between the United States, Peru, Colombia and Ecuador.
As a result of pressure from civil society in the United States, Washington
can no longer subordinate internal environmental regulatory functions to
international trade treaties, says the document.
"The U.S. negotiators have responded to this pressure by encouraging their
trading partners to strengthen their own environmental legislation," it
adds.
Adapting national environmental laws to the free trade agreement has been
rejected by civil society groups in the Andean countries, which see this as
subordinating sovereign legislative functions to the trade agenda of the
United States, a country that is not even a party to the Kyoto Protocol.
Negotiators from the three Andean countries are sticking by the Andean
Community's binding environmental rules and regulations in the free trade
talks with the United States, in the absence of strong national
environmental laws.
(END/2005)
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
What is RSS?
