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The launch of two WWF reports on the effects of climate change on national parks in the United States led Vice-President Al gore to visit Glacier National Park to see the melting Grinnell Glacier for himself.
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If the 1980s were the hottest decade for a century, the 1990s may yet turn out hotter. In some parts of Europe rainfall is at its lowest levels for
250 years, while others have experienced catastrophic flooding. Scientists now agree that global climate change is a fact, but much can be done to minimize its effects
and to ensure that, overall, the problems do not
get worse.
The major contributor to climate change is carbon dioxide (CO2), released into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, mainly coal and oil. "The availability of energy is a key element in development," says Adam Markham, Director of WWF International's Climate Change Campaign, "but the by-products of energy production are driving climate change. The question is how to make energy available to more people, while reducing damaging emissions from current levels.
If we can achieve this, we really will have made development sustainable."
Keeping this long-term aim clearly in focus, WWF lobbies governments to reduce CO2 emissions, demonstrates how energy conservation and alternative sources of energy production such as solar and wind power can make a difference, and researches the effects of climate change on the natural world.
Clear evidence
This year WWF published a report revealing that global warming, in conjunction with other environmental threats, is severely damaging coral reefs in the Caribbean and Pacific. It showed that no less than 60 major instances of coral bleaching, an indication that the corals' complex biological systems are breaking down, were reported between 1979 and 1990, compared to just 3 in the previous 100 years. The report concludes that 10 per cent of all reefs are degraded beyond recognition,
that 30 per cent more may be lost within the next decade, and that a further 30 per cent could disappear within 20 to 40 years, all unable to survive the effects of warmer sea temperatures and the rise in sea levels predicted under continued global warming.
Threats to corals put people's livelihoods at risk: many of the 25 million tourists to the Caribbean, who generate US$7 billion per annum in revenue for the island states, are attracted by the spectacular corals, while Australia's Great Barrier Reef draws 2 million visitors every year. But coral reefs are also "rainforests beneath the oceans", home to hundreds of species, vital breeding grounds for fish and other marine species, and effective barriers that protect tropical shorelines from devastation by storms.
Energy efficiency
Around the world, WWF is pioneering ways of saving energy and encouraging the use of clean energy sources. WWF works with the Polish Energy Efficiency Centre to cut wasteful energy use in public buildings and to spread, through schools, energy saving ideas that pupils can pass on to their parents. In China, WWF, with the Beijing Energy Efficiency Centre, promotes the local production of renewable energy products and services.
WWF also encourages individual enterprises to effect change. This year an alliance has been formed with AEG, Germany's household appliance giant, who will increase the "eco-friendliness" of one of its ranges.
But this is just a start. "Over the next two or three years," says AEG's spokesman Reiner Konig, "we will be sharing our technologies and experiences with other parts of
our parent company, Electrolux."
In the United States, WWF is working with Evergreen Solar, a solar energy company, and Real Goods, a mail order retailer, to promote the development of commercially viable photovoltaic cells. A leading French mail order company, 3 Suisse France, has pledged to reduce its CO2 emissions by 25 per cent within five years, while in Denmark the Best Western Hotel Chain will reduce its energy use by 25 per cent over the next three years.
Persistence
Developments like these encourage WWF to continue to lobby governments who have signed the International Framework Convention on Climate Change, and particularly those of industrialized nations, to improve on their obligations under the convention and to cut their CO2 emissions to 20 per cent below 1990 levels by the year 2005. The original UN target date was the year 2000 with emissions just returning to 1990 levels, and only the United Kingdom and Germany, of the developed nations, seem likely to reach this. Undeterred, WWF, backed by individual and corporate action and scientific evidence of the damage global climate change is doing, believes that its improved targets are not only achievable but imperative.