Tiempo Climate Newswatch

The Ad Hoc Working Groups on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol and on Long-term Cooperative Action are currently meeting in Bangkok. The meeting will take forward the five necessary elements of a Copenhagen agreement as defined by the recent United Nations Summit on Climate Change. The five elements concern action to help the vulnerable adapt, emissions targets for industrialized nations, supported, nationally-appropriate mitigation actions for developing nations, scaled-up financial and technological resources for the developing world, and an equitable governance structure to manage and deploy that support.

It is hoped that significant progress can be made in resolving issues related to adaptation action, REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and land degradation in developing countries), technology, capacity building and institutional arrangement for finance. Delegates face a considerable task, though, in refining the current negotiating texts. "It is an absolute mess," said Yvo de Boer, head of the climate treaty secretariat. "The translators came to me to say they are unable to translate it [from English] because the text doesn't make any sense." This is the penultimate meeting in the run-up to the critical conference in Copenhagen in December.

Typhoon Ketsana tracked across Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos mid week, having brought the worst flooding in four decades to Manila in the Philippines. Over 80 per cent of the capital city was left under water. "[It] was an extreme event that has strained our response capabilities to the limit. But it is not breaking us," said President Gloria Arroyo. In the aftermath, Philippines' officials were preparing compulsory evacuation plans as Typhoon Parma approached. "We are dealing with a very strong typhoon [and] there is a big possibility that this typhoon will gather more strength," said Nathaniel Cruz, weather bureau chief of the Philippine Atmospheric Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration. Parma passed over the northern provinces, killing 15 people. Ketsana was responsible for close to 500 deaths over the region as a whole.

Over 180 people are reported dead as a result of the tsunami that struck Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga last week after a local earthquake. Despite considerable efforts to improve systems since the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, little warning was available to those in vulnerable coastal villages and resorts. It takes at least 15 minutes to analyze essential data about an earthquake to assess the tsunami risk, says James Goff of the Australian Tsunami Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii issued its first alert 18 minutes after the quake. By then, the first wave had smashed into the coasts of Samoa and American Samoa. "People assume that if they have an early-warning system, their problems are solved," comments Goff. "But it's only one of a suite of ways of being aware of what's going on. What's really needed is education about the natural indicators. If you live by the coast and there's a very large earthquake, or if you see the water receding very quickly and going much lower than low tide, you need to move uphill."

"Three quarters of all disasters globally are now climate-related, up from half, just a decade ago, and we can expect worse," Ban Ki-Moon, United Nations secretary-general, told the Ninth Conference of the Parties (COP-9) to the Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. "These disasters are exacerbated by desertification, land degradation and drought," he continued, describing these as "among the most pressing global environmental challenges of our time, threatening to reverse the gains of sustainable development that have emerged in many parts of the world over the past few years."

Scientists at the UNCCD 1st Scientific Conference, held prior to COP-9, called for more coordination in monitoring and assessing land degradation around the world, including the creation of an interdisciplinary scientific advisory body for policy makers. "Science and technology hold the key to coping with the desertification-climate change nexus," said William Dar, head of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, which is based in Andhra Pradesh, India. "With the right combination of holistic policies and sustained global action, path-breaking science can help curb desertification and land degradation, improving the livelihoods of millions of poor people in drylands."