Bali summit should produce positive climate change policies

Members of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change are meeting in Bali, Indonesia, to continue talks that have to see the world taking a tougher stand on cutting down greenhouse gas emissions. In a world whose climate is increasingly changing due to destructive environment practices like cutting down huge swathes of forests and industrial gas emissions, about 160 nations met in 1997 to talk about climate change. In what was later to become the Kyoto Protocol, all participating countries were to decide how they would reduce carbon dioxide emissions between 2008 and 2012. It is to continue such talks that Bali has now become the centre of attention. Of course whether the United States of America (the largest emitter of carbon in the world) bows down to pressure to ratify the protocol, or whether Australia receives acclaim at the beginning of the current summit because it has agreed to ratify the treaty, is immaterial in the long run. The US and Australia, plus a host of other countries who think differently about the matter of nursing the environment a little more carefully, all are living in the same fragile glass house. It might be today or tomorrow, but eventually we all have to realize that living destructively is not tenable and we need to change. We breathe the same air, and so we need to protect it at all costs. Whether it is Canada or British Columbia’s infamous logging – furious cutting down of very old forests for gain – or Uganda’s support for giving away of miles of forest cover for sugar plantations, we have to take cognizance of the fact that it is the sum total of all this reckless living that is causing hitherto unheard of unnatural calamities. This affects the whole world, not just individual nations.Rwanda is doing its part very well. Tree planting as just one of the environment watch projects is being done everywhere, and we are proud of this. John Donne will conclude:“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were …” Ends