Renew On Line (UK) 31

Extracts from the May-June 2001 edition of Renew
These extracts only represent about 25% of it

Climate Change

IPCC confirm it

In its latest major report, the first since 1995, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, suggested that temperature might rise by as much as 5.8 degrees C, by the end of the century, unless major steps were taken to curb emissions. They were now much more confident that these Climate Change effects were mostly due to human activities rather than natural causes. These conclusions had already been relayed to COP-6, but now the full report is available: see http://www.ipcc.ch/ www.usgcrp.gov/ipcc/SRs/

Going one step further, the US Union of Concerned Scientists has produced a report claiming that the reality might be even worse- with talk of up to a 10 degree C rise by 2100, and a runaway greenhouse effect that might eventually turn the earth into a Venus type planet.

See http://www.ucsusa.org/

UNEP want action

Accelerating the introduction of environmentally friendly energy such as solar, wind and wave power is one of the most pressing issues of the new millennium, Klaus Toepfer, the head of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) told a meeting of the G-8 Task Force on Renewable Energy at the French Ministry of the Environment. He said that green energy must be put at the heart of sustainable development if the threats of climate change and the need to tackle poverty and ill health in the developing world are to be truly addressed.

Renewable energy was also discussed in detail when UNEP and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs hosted an African High-level Regional Meeting on Energy and Sustainable Development And this topic also took center stage when ministers from 10 African countries met at UNEP's headquarters in Nairobi to agree on a common position on sustainable energy use. The ministers subsequently submitted their conclusions to the 9th session of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development in April.

Rio plus 10

This flurry of diplomatic activity is all part of the build up the UN’s major Rio Plus Ten Earth Summit scheduled for next year in Johannesburg, South Africa- ten years on from the initial Earth Summit h in Rio. The Rio plus ten gathering is also seen as the deadline for the ratification of the Kyoto Climate Change accord. However progress on that was stalled by the collapse of the COP-6 meeting in the Hague last year. Attempts to reconvene this session, initially planned for May in Bonn, were confronted by the US asking for a delay, and then came Bush’s anti- Kyoto blast: see next page.