After three centuries of relentless damage to earth's delicately balanced ecology, humanity finally appears to be waking up to the havoc it has
wrought. The past decade saw the most clinching evidence ever - provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - that human activity had pushed greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere to almost the tipping point. Another few decades of business as usual, and our planet will hit an irreversible slide into catastrophic climate changes, destroying civilisation as we know it today. The decade is ending with a failure to agree on an acceptable way out, but Copenhagen also marks the first glimmer of an awareness that time is running out for humanity.
The coming decade will thus be dominated by global efforts to cut emissions and change over to a life less rooted in the carbon economy. If an agreement is not reached in the next two to three years, and carbon emissions are not reduced from 2015 onwards , the target of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius by 2050 will not be achieved. Indeed, a confidential UN document that was leaked at Copenhagen shows that the world is headed towards a three degrees Celsius rise by 2050 unless the developed world takes much larger emission cuts than they have been promising so far.
Scientists are agreed that at the present level of warming, extreme weather events, rising sea levels and shrinking glaciers will increasingly become evident in the coming decade, with severe consequences for agriculture, health and the global economy.
The big hope lies in increasing use of emission-reducing technology. Reaching the 2°C target will require a broad portfolio of possible technological pathways , says Brigitte Knopf of the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research, who is associated with the IPCC. "There is no silver bullet of one technology that does the job. However, for ambitious mitigation targets, some technologies become very important: bio-energy use, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), and renewable energy," she told TOI-Crest .
The bill for these efforts will come to a few percentage points of global GDP. If technologies do not become available, either costs or temperature will go up, says Knopf. Several breakthroughs have been made in green technologies for automobiles, and these will get commercialised soon. A big push towards use of solar, wind and geothermal energies can also be expected.
Happily, progress has been made in containing or reversing some aspects of environmental damage in the past decade. Deforestation, which was as high as 8.9 million hectares per year in 1990-2000 , dropped to about 7.3 million hectares per year in the past decade. This has happened because of serious forestry initiatives by several countries including China, India, US and several South American countries. However, in some of the top deforestation regions like Indonesia and Brazil, the rate is still high. Deforestation contributes about a quarter of annual carbon emissions , so efforts to check it are being accorded top priority.
But there's bad news when it comes to endangered species. Advancing urbanisation, deforestation and poaching are destroying other forms of life at an alarming rate. In 2000, the Red List prepared by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) had 10,533 species listed as threatened. In 2009, this number had risen to 17,291. Several threatened animal species became extinct in the past decade, including the Baiji dolphin (China), the West African Black Rhino, the Golden Toad (Costa Rica), the Spix's Macaw (Brazil) and Po'o-uli bird (Hawaii, US). The coming decade will be a test of survival for many threatened species, including the royal Bengal tiger. It will also determine whether we can save the earth itself from devastating climate change.
No comments:
Post a Comment