Hopes of Greener Pastures ...

Climate Change Talks : The Fate of Seesaw Discourses

Climate change talks are riding hurdles again. Though the sense of an impending crisis has united World nations into the one umbrella of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ( UNFCC ) it is far from achieving the success of the outlined roadmap. This decade old framework is yet to deliver on its promises. This invites serious introspection on projected action plans. Varied interests of the national goverments is seen as the real bottleneck to the progress of the talks. United States and European Union voices the concerns of rising carbon emissions from developing nations like China and India. On the contrary, the group of developing countries are demanding adequate compensations from the Developed economies for their role in green house gas emissions. Beneath the diplomatic jargons, it is conspicuous that all the nations are worried about impacts on their GDP. This being a bare truth, the confidence building measures are the needed from the important corners.

It becomes an apparent reality that trends in market integrations hasn't cleared the air of suspicion in the global governmental interactions. So there is a natural tendency from developing economies to suspect climate change as a tool to decelerate their pace of development. In a closer look at these deadlocks, one can see that more than national interests, it is the private lobbies that drives the engines of change. It sabotages the fate of the routine conferences and foretells the fate of many failed action plans. Added to this, lobbies of different market forces have united against a rational direction of the cause. Their cooked up reports are creating a chaotic environment in popular media discussions. And private interests have started taking shapes of blogger opinions and science books denying the impact of human action on climate change. In this murky climate, natural calamities are taking their heavy toll of people and infrastructure, like an eye opener to the heights of our inaction. Irrespective of the continents, disasters are rampaging uncontrolled and unpredicted.

Environment should be considered in its wholesome entirety, where climate is one among the factors of human survival coupled with political economy, nation state policies and international relations. Climate changes can be the result of human inaction as well as the geological changes. Further studies are the pathways to get more clarity on this. Thus seeing climate change as a singular issue will not constitute the solution. It will only aggravate the differences among the nations. And it can very well spread to other spheres of collaboration too. Climate change talks should be coupled with poverty eradication measures, reducing international trade disparities, addressing exploitation of poor countries etc. This is essential for breaking the ice with many war-torn nations and under developed countries for whom the priorities are day to day survival and reverting to democracy.If not, climate change talks will go down in the history of international politics as another seesaw discourse!