Climate Change
What is changing the climate?
Our planet is getting warmer. The summer of 1995 was the hottest ever in many parts of the northern hemisphere. A 15year drought is causing human hardship and threatening wildlife in southern Africa. And there is every indication that the future will be even hotter.
What is the greenhouse effect?
The greenhouse effect is a natural feature of the earth's atmosphere. Certain gases, such as water vapour, carbon dioxide (CO2), and methane, are called "greenhouse gases" because they trap solar heat in the lower atmosphere. Without them, our planet would be frozen and nothing would be able to live on it.
But there are clear signs that humans are adding to these gases, producing pollutants that cause a gas buildup in the atmosphere. Most important of the gases produced as a result of human activities is CO2. CO2 is given off whenever we burn carboncontaining materials, notably coal and oil (known as "fossil fuels"), and remains in the atmosphere on average for more than a century. Over the past 200 years, CO2 concentration in the air has risen by a third.
People living in developed countries burn far more fossil fuels than people in the developing world. The average North American adds more than 5 tonnes of carbon to the air each year, a European or Japanese between 2 and 3 tonnes, a Chinese 0.6 tonnes, and an Indian 0.2 tonnes. More than 90 per cent of the manmade CO2 currently in the atmosphere emanated from Europe and North America.
If we carry on as we are, there will be twice as much CO2 in the atmosphere by late next century. As a result, temperatures will rise by an average 1oC.
What is the "amplifier effect"?
As the planet warms up, the ice caps at the North and South Poles melt. When heat from the sun reaches these polar regions, the white ice reflects it straight back into space. As the ice caps melt, less heat will be reflected. This is likely to make the earth get hotter. Global warming will also evaporate more water from the oceans into the air. Water vapour is a greenhouse gas. So again, extra warming is likely to occur. Effects like these are called "amplifier effects".
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) pools the work of the world's top 2,500 climate scientists. Its First Assessment Report, which appeared in 1990, maintained that if CO2 is doubled, the amplifier effect will increase warming to 2.5oC.
Warming on this scale would have major effects on the planet. The effects could be catastrophic. As ice melts, sea levels will rise, flooding lowlying land, perhaps obliterating entire nations in the Pacific Ocean. As the atmosphere's energy balance changes, some parts of the world could experience dramatic changes in the weather. This could cause massive fluctuations in temperature and rainfall, and greatly alter cropgrowing seasons. There are signs that this is already happening: Argentina, Australia, Kazakhstan, Russia, and the US all reported harvests that were lower than expected in 1995. And the 1995 west Atlantic hurricane season was the busiest for 50 years.
What are governments doing?
The first IPCC report helped persuade 154 nations plus the EC (now the EU) to sign the UN Climate Convention at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. The convention entered into force on 21 March 1994 and has now been ratified by 142 countries plus the EC.
The convention calls on industrialized nations to return their emissions of greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by the year 2000.
It also aims to "[stabilize] greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous [humaninduced] interference with the climate system."
The parties to the Climate Convention held their first full conference in Berlin in March 1995. Governments agreed industrialized countries' commitments are inadequate. They therefore established a group to work on the "Berlin Mandate" to carry out a "process to enable governments to take appropriate action for the period beyond 2000, including a strengthening of developed country commitments, through the adoption of a protocol or another legal instrument."
This process is to be completed as early as possible, so that its results can be adopted at the third conference in 1997. The group has met three times, and is currently working on a proposal for a protocol put forward by the European Union. It next meets in July 1996.
Meanwhile, the IPCC is working on a Second Assessment Report. This document, finalized in Rome in December 1995, is a significant breakthrough because for the first time scientists have formally acknowledged the links between human activities and climate change. The report states that "recent temperature rises are unlikely to be due to natural causes", and that "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate".
This greatly weakens the arguments of the "climate change sceptics", who claim that current climatic changes are "natural" and that there is nothing to worry about. The report is therefore crucially important to international efforts to combat the threat of climate change, and will have an important influence on all subsequent climate negotiations.
What is WWF doing?
WWF's principal aim is to conserve nature. Climate change threatens many of the world's most valuable species and ecosystems. If WWF is to conserve coral reefs, boreal forests, and alpine flower meadows, it must protect them from climate change.
So in 1995 WWF launched a new international climate change campaign. The campaign has three key objectives: to strengthen the Climate Convention, to promote energy efficiency in developing countries, and to assess the impact of climate change on wildlife.
A WWF International quarterly Publications list is available on request.
May 1996
WWF continues to be known as World Wildlife Fund in Canada and the United StatesCopyright 1996, The World Wide Fund For Nature
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