Climate change: Dark clouds on horizon

2007/10/29

The recent unseasonal floods in Johor are clear signs that the climate patterns are slowly changing.

ON Sept 24, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon convened the first-ever high-level meeting focused on climate change. Heads of state represented 80 of the 164 participating nations; foreign ministers a further 40. This was an unprecedented gathering of world leaders, which testified that climate change is happening and demands urgent action.
As Ban said, this event at the UN expressed the political will of world leaders to tackle the challenge of climate change. The importance of climate change was further emphasised by the award of the Nobel Peace Prize earlier this month to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for bringing world attention to climate change.The first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) ends in 2012. The Conference of Parties (COP) to the UNFCCC will meet in Bali from Dec 3 to 14 to negotiate a post-Kyoto Framework.What happens between now and the COP will be crucial to the success of the negotiations. We need clear leadership and commitment.That is why today and tomorrow, the Malaysian government will host a regional conference on climate change. The conference will be addressed by leading specialists from across the region and beyond. The aim will be to help frame the debate on climate change in Southeast Asia. It will also put Malaysia right at the heart of this debate, working closely with regional partners, as well as with the United Kingdom.
The conference is being organised by the Natural Resources and Environment Ministry, in close collaboration with the British High Commission in Malaysia. Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak will deliver the keynote address and open the conference, tagged “Reducing the Threats and Harnessing the Opportunities of Climate Change".This conference has not come about by accident. Last year, the world-renowned economist Sir Nicholas Stern published his now famous review on the economic impact of climate change. He concluded that current global emission levels were unsustainable. And the economic cost of failure to act now would be far greater than the cost of acting.Two months after Stern published his review, Malaysians saw for themselves the economic damage caused by the unseasonal floods in Johor.It was immediately apparent that climate change will increase the frequency and severity of such events in the future. This regional conference comes at an opportune time, as it allows participants to inject the conference outcomes directly into the meeting of the COP to the UNFCCC in Bali.Southeast Asia is home to one of the world’s great biodiversity regions. These regions are essential to maintain climate security for the whole planet. The region is vulnerable to climate change, with large areas of coastline potentially threatened by a rise in sea levels. Water supplies are equally at risk. All of us living in this region would have to bear the adverse economic impacts of repeated instances of flooding.The key to tackling climate change on a global scale is working together to build a low-carbon economy. This will require deeper international co-operation in many areas, most notably in creating markets for carbon trading, driving technology research and promoting adaptation, particularly for developing countries.In addition, other important and significant themes in climate change will include mitigation, energy security, climate change negotiations, and the relationship of land use change and forestry to climate change, which will be discussed in this conference.At Bali, the Malaysian and British governments need to work with other countries to put together the plan for how the world will achieve climate security. One thing is clear: we need to act now. That is why the regional conference over the next two days matters.