Bannière

Newsletter


Publicité

Bannière
PUBLICITE

Dossier de la Rédaction

PUBLICITE
Bannière

Now The World is Talking!

Not even the most optimistic of diplomats could believe their eyes last Saturday when the French Foreign Minister and chairperson of COP ’21 hit the gavel from his raised table to announced that the 195 countries working even into the wee hours on a daily basis since December 2 had finally reached an agreement. At that moment it was as if world nations had finally seen the need to be talking to each other. Since then it has been celebration time around the world. And for good reason because this agreement had taken just too long in coming and few believed an agreement was even possible at all given that the various parties had stuck to their guns and as they kept the stalemate, the world’s climatic condition was dangerously gliding into an irretrievably dangerous situation. Africa comes out of these negotiations with something to write home about. Its ambition was to see global warming at the 2°Celsius maximum level; but the agreement went for even as low as 1.5°C. Because of feet-dragging and even outright refusal to adhere to the conclusions of the 2009 Copenhagen summit were it was agreed that 100 Billion US Dollars were going to be made available for the poorer countries to face off challenges posed by climate change; and this by 2020. The Paris climate conference did more than just endorsing this because of the binding nature of all the decisions taken and the legal value of the agreement signed last Saturday, African and other developing countries can now be guaranteed that the money will readily come in the compensate their effort.

The bullish posture of the African negotiators when they came out of the final plenary last Saturday is certainly a good indication that some of the other details specific to African countries must have been taken into account. This agreement is also a vindication of the appeals President Biya has always made whenever any opportunity was given him to address the international community whether on specific climate conferences or not. A staunch advocate of climate justice, the President of the Republic has taken the issue globalizing the climate threat to virtually every international forum he has addressed in the past ten years. At the 60th session of the UN general assembly on September 16, 2005, he sounded a note of warning on the need for equity. Hear him; “…Cameroon and other countries of the Congo Basin, which is the second largest forest reserve in the world, have adopted management policies which sustainably conserve the environment and the ecosystem…our countries are thus happy to contribute to the improvement of the quality of life on our planet…It will be equitable that the considerable loss of revenue received some just reward in return.” In Copenhagen on December 17, 2009, he told that year’s climate summit that “the global nature of climate change requires that solutions too should be global.” The euphoria over the signing of the agreement last Saturday will continue only for as long as it is applied on the ground. As several NGOs are already indicating, the political will expressed in the agreement is far from what may apply on the field. Even if the Paris agreement is said to be legally-binding on all the 195 signatory parties, no world court exists that will ensure its enforcement. The onus of applying the agreement to the letter is very much on the industrialized countries which had never really shown the political will to get things moving; as exemplified by the feet-dragging in applying the Kyoto Protocol of December 11, 1997. In any case, the very fact that these 195 countries are talking – and talking with results – is already a victory.



Commentaires (0)
Seul les utilisateurs enregistrés peuvent écrire un commentaire!

!joomlacomment 4.0 Copyright (C) 2009 Compojoom.com . All rights reserved."



haut de page  
PUBLICITE
Bannière