19 April 2008

'Globalized responsibility' must to tackle climate change: UK

Veeramalla Anjaiah
The Jakarta Post's World News - April 18, 2008
Original URL

It's a time for every country, rich and poor, to focus on how to make the transition from being 'high carbon' to 'low carbon' economies, rather than just focusing on money alone, Britain says.

"The British government believes it is important to focus on opportunities rather than costs if we are to successfully move toward developing low carbon economies," UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office's special envoy on climate change John Ashton said Wednesday in London.

A copy of Ashton's remarks were sent to The Jakarta Post by the British Embassy in Jakarta and received Thursday.

In Paris, world's top 17 emitters of green house gases, including Britain, are attending a two-day a meeting to work out ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The meeting will end on Friday.

The talks, which are also being attended by the European Union and the United Nations, are the third in a U.S.-led series trying to end criticism that the U.S. lagging behind its other industrial allies who have agreed to cut emissions by at least 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12 under the Kyoto Protocol.

It would be pointless to just think about the financial costs alone, Ashton says.

"So far we've had an enormous amount of focus on the cost of this transformation and how to 'share the pain'."

"The politics of sharing pain is always extremely difficult, and extremely slow," Ashton said.

He also warned that there should not be any deadlines for climate change, similar to deadlines used in trade negotiations.

"We can't do this with climate change, because the deadlines are set by the way in which the environment responds to stresses we're imposing on natural systems, and we will pay an intolerable price if we get that wrong -- if we can't meet the deadlines we set," Ashton said.

Which is why, Ashton continues, there is a real need for us to establish collective responsibility in tackling climate change.

"This is about how we build ... what I call the 'globalization of responsibility'. What we've observed so far in globalization, is the 'globalization of opportunity'," Ashton said.

Indonesia hosted the 190-nation climate conference in Bali last year to prepare a new UN treaty to fight global warming in place of Kyoto Protocol, which will be expired in 2012.

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1 comment:

Aparana Chauhan said...

Nice way to uplift the world's attention towards the tremulous global warming