Tiempo Climate Newswatch

A new report on ways of coping with climate change concludes that the technology exists to "seize significant opportunities around the globe" to reduce emissions and provide other economic, environmental and social benefits. The study, Confronting Climate Change: Avoiding the Unmanageable and Managing the Unavoidable, was sponsored by the United Nations Foundation and Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society. UN Foundation head Timothy E Wirth called the report "a very handy basis for how the climate issue is handled." It is "an attempt to define the beginnings of a course through the scientific impact, what we know about the impact of climate change and what we will know about possible measures of what we will do," he continued.

Confronting Climate Change advocates improvements in energy efficiency and greater energy saving in the areas of transportation and in the design and management of buildings, stricter standards for equipment and appliances and expanded use of biofuels, amongst other options. The United Nations and related multilateral institutions should help countries in need to finance and deploy energy efficient and new energy technologies whilst moving forward more rapidly negotiations to develop a new international framework for addressing climate change and sustainable development. "Humanity must act collectively and urgently to change course through leadership at all levels of society," the report warns. "There is no more time for delay."

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has heard the Inuit case for relief from the impact of climate change, with the United States cited as the world's largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions. "Climate change threatens our very survival as peoples," said activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier, arguing that global warming violates the rights of indigenous people throughout the hemisphere. "Whole communities, such as Shishmaref in Alaska, are having to move altogether because the storms are eroding the land out from under them," she said. "These impacts are destroying our rights to life, health, property and means of subsistence. States that do not recognize these impacts and take action violate our human rights."

The G77 group has hit back at proposals that developing countries accept emissions constraints under any successor to the Kyoto Protocol. "Most environmental degradation that's happened has been historically caused by the industrial world," said Munir Akram, G77 chair, last week. "China, India and others are at the stage where they are now taking off and it's quite natural that their emissions of carbon are increasing," he continued. "There's a sort of propaganda effort to try to shift the blame for environmental degradation on to these fast-growing economies, and the motives are not very well disguised." "Unless the North comes to grips with its responsibility it will be difficult to come to an international consensus by which all of us can contribute to halting the degradation of the environment, and certainly stopping the development of developing countries is not the answer," he warned.

European light bulb manufacturers have agreed in principle to cooperate in phasing out incandescents for domestic use. According to the European Lamp Companies Federation, the strategy would include "public incentives to encourage consumers to purchase more efficient products and setting performance standards that will eliminate the least efficient products from the market." Theo van Deursen of Royal Philips Electronics predicts that, in the long-term, lights based on light-emitting diodes (LEDs) will dominate the market. LED lamps are twelve times as efficient as conventional incandescent bulbs and last longer than compact fluorescents. They can produce any colour light.

Russia has launched its first energy-awareness campaign in recent times, encouraging Moscow inhabitants to adopt high-efficiency light bulbs. "It's all about conserving energy supplies and nothing to do with the environment," commented Igor Bashmakov of the independent Center for Energy Efficiency, based in Moscow. Andrei Turnitsa of Kosmos a company that sells energy-saving bulbs and is a partner in the campaign, said it was the shock of power cuts that led to the initiative. Low temperatures in January 2006 generated power shortages and international concern as gas exports to Europe were reduced.