By Claude Martin
We are coming to the end of what may well have been the worst year in history — and certainly in recent memory — for the effects of extreme weather conditions: of drought and forest fires, of the fiercest hurricanes and the most dangerous floods.
Gland, Switzerland: I shall never forget the day, some years ago, when I was climbing the north-east ridge of the Eiger in my native Switzerland and the weather changed from summery sunshine to a violent storm of hail and snow.
The feeling you get when your climbing route turns into an icy waterfall, and a little blue flame starts dancing on your ice pick just before the lightning strikes nearby, is something that stays with you always. Nothing is more frightening than unpredictable weather conditions.
We have good cause to remember that in 1998, with thousands of people killed by what we like to call “freak“ weather conditions and hundreds of thousands more forced to flee their homes and fight for their lives.
Recently my attention was drawn to a remarkable photograph taken in Bangladesh during the September rains. Taken by a cameraman working for the Keystone agency, it showed a young boy in the midst of a horrific flood. The caption indicated that, despite his precarious situation, the boy had been selfless enough to save two monkeys.
That, I suspect, is the version animal protectionists would like to believe. A social anthropologist would probably maintain that in Hindu mythology monkeys are half-gods and the boy, by saving deity, was only increasing his own chances of survival.
Nonsense, most conservationists would say. Those rhesus monkeys are a pest in many villages. They hate water and would have jumped on to anything that floated — a log, for preference, but that is something rare in Bangladesh.
Increasingly, pictures determine our perceptions of the world, but people rarely think about the different effects that they may have, depending upon who is receiving the message. Every picture tells a story, but it is not the same one for everybody who sees it.
In Western culture, that photograph of the Bangladeshi boy has what might be termed the “aaah“ factor. It promotes a warm feeling about selflessness, and about the relationship we would like to think exists been mankind and animals. Television pictures of the deadly mudslides in Honduras and Nicaragua, on the other hand, evoke horror, sympathy, and a strong desire to do something to help those devastated countries and their peoples.
But what are such pictures really telling the world? How many of us, on seeing them, reflect that we are coming to the end of what may well have been the worst year in history — and certainly in recent memory — for the effects of extreme weather conditions? Each photograph is really part of a much larger picture: a scene of drought and forest fires, of the fiercest hurricanes and the most dangerous floods.
And the background to that big picture is the advancing process of climate change — something which, only two years ago, many people still struggled to believe, and especially the role of human society in exacerbating it.
The Climate Change Campaign launched by WWF, which completed its initial three-year phase last June, was tremendously successful in bringing the issue to public attention. More importantly, it also helped to put climate change on the world political agenda, with governments now wrestling with the problem of how to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide that affect our weather and how the costs should be met.
Just this month, the latest round of the United Nations climate conference took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with the aim of determining practical ways to implement the now famous Kyoto Protocol on reducing emissions of the gases that cause global warming. There was no repeat of the breakthrough that produced the targets set at the Kyoto conference in Japan last year, but at least the steps that were taken were forward rather than backward.
“Governments have moved well beyond discussing the science,“ said the leader of the WWF delegation in Buenos Aires. “That is a good development. But they need to do more to respond to public fears as the impacts of climate change become increasingly apparent.“
One problem is that governments will usually look for the easiest and least expensive way out of difficulty, and it is here that WWF's climate activities dovetail with another of our campaigns, that of conserving the world's rapidly dwindling forests.
Some countries look to trees to help meet agreed targets for the reduction of their carbon emissions, even though there are great uncertainties surrounding the question of carbon absorption and storage by forests. Indeed, the forests that remain today are probably a net source of carbon emissions because of deforestation and fires.
Again, it is a question of how one looks at things. The link between forests and climate change is not simply one of using trees as a sort of carbon sink that would help to avoid the difficult step of actually reducing their emissions. The fact is that the forests we wish to conserve are themselves victims of climate change as drought and hurricanes become more frequent. Over the next half-century, the unstable weather conditions could have a disastrous effect on the remaining forest land.
So increasingly the WWF climate and forest teams are working together to face this challenge. We, at least, are trying our best to look at the big picture. We must hope others will do the same.
(884 words)
*Dr Claude Martin is Director General of WWF International.