Chairperson, comrades and colleagues, two hundred years since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the biosphere and the human civilisation that has evolved from it is at an abyss. Whilst industrial civilisation has brought about unimaginable human advances and comforts, it is clear that these have been begotten at a price that threatens the very existence of life on our planet.
It is instructive, if not ironic, that on the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the authoritative world scientific body on the study of climate change drew two fundamental conclusions in its February report this year. It said that:
Warming of the climate system is unequivocal as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air ...
Furthermore, the report goes on to say:
Eleven of the last twelve years - 1995 to 2006 - rank among the 12 warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature.
In a section subtitled ``Understanding and attributing climate change'', the report notes that:
Most of the observed increases in global average temperatures since the mid-twentieth century are very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.
In other words, it is human-made.
The Stern Review of the esteemed economist Sir Nicholas Stern, released in October last year, counsels that doing nothing about climate change could cost us about 5% to 20% of global gross domestic product. Already the heat wave in 2003 in Europe, which killed 35 000 people, resulted in US$15 billion losses in European agriculture.
Climate change is a term that is used to describe the warming and cooling of the climate. It is a process that can take place naturally, like the cooling that took place in the Ice Age. Global warming is a particular variant of climate change, which refers to the increase in the average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere and oceans, which have been noticed in past decades.
As a result of global warming, there are distinguishable environmental consequences. These include the melting of glaciers, the increasing frequency of floods, a rise in sea levels, increasing occurrence of droughts, scarcity of water, the loss of biodiversity, which takes the form of forest diebacks, and the extinction of some plant and animal species as well as the regularity and severity of weather events such as heat waves and hurricanes.
In an absorbing presentation on the economics of climate change, Sir Nicholas Stern, two days ago here in Cape Town, made the point that as early as 200 years ago, the French mathematician, Fourier, noticed that human activities were having an impact on the environment, which impact was the overall increase of the temperature levels.
Despite these early observations, there have been a number of dismissals of the scientific nature of the claim that there is global warming. The impact of this denial has been to undermine appropriate responses to this challenge.
Since 1987, in Montreal, there have been a number of international agreements and mechanisms which the global community has entered into as part of its response to the challenge of climate change. The Montreal Protocol focused on the detection and management of ozone-depleting substances. In 1989, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established, whose brief is the scientific assessment of climate change, as well as elaborating the best responses to the problem.
In 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was established as the international framework to agree on strategies to stabilise the emission of greenhouse gases.
The Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997 and came into effect on 16 February 2005. Its import is in the fact that it is a legally binding international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. The second fundamental dimension of the Kyoto Protocol is the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. At the heart of this principle is an attempt to address the fact that not only are the developed countries the most polluting countries, but they are also the ones that have mainly been responsible for global warming. It is therefore these countries that must mostly reduce their gas emissions.
Secondly, the principle seeks to address the fact that developing countries will have to emit greenhouse gases as part of their developing challenge, and therefore, the reduction that the developed countries make should be of such a nature as to give space for the developing countries to develop, within a broad framework of overall reduction of global warming.
Central to the management of global warming has been a global effort to find solutions to the rise in temperatures. We have the strategies that seek to address the fact that this phenomenon is already with us, and is already threatening life systems and livelihoods. How then should the nations of the world adapt to it? How do you address the fact that, as a result of global warming, fish stocks are leaving Saldanha and going to Chile; that hurricanes are destroying cities, and floods are impoverishing Third World villagers who are least able to defend and protect themselves.
The difficult problem of adaptation is that it is essentially a Third World issue and therefore does not have the same profile as the mitigation issues.
Despite this, we welcome and support the establishment of the Least Developed Countries Fund as well as the Special Climate Change Fund, both of which are under the United Nations Framework on Climate Change.
Another initiative worthy of support is one that is based on taxing the volumes of transactions derived from the clean development mechanism, which presages the evolution of a global tax, and dovetails well with the call for a 2% adaptation levy on all flexible mechanisms under the Kyoto Protocol.
Adaptation is the prevention and reduction of activities that induce climate change, referred to as the mitigation interventions, and is about the use of clean technologies. The first point to be made in this regard is that some of these technologies already exist, and the challenge is their access and diffusion to the world at large.
The Global Legislatures for a Balanced Environment, Globe, technology working group, whose thesis we discussed in Washington last month, identified the challenge of mitigation in the following ways:
We propose to focus on five main areas:
First, what scope already exists for deploying available clean technologies globally?
Second, barriers to investing in low carbon and carbon-free technologies in developed and developing countries with examples on how these might be overcome.
Third, policies, emission trends and technology needs of developing economies and economies in transition, and how these relate to decision-making processes in the economic models, including synergies and trade-offs between climate change and other priorities such as job creation and industrial development.
Fourth, how to combine regulatory approaches that can push and market approaches that can `pull' technology solutions in the most effective ways, able to bring about the range and extent of change needed to develop and deploy clean and more efficient technologies.
Fifth, how the transfer of efficient low-carbon technologies can be promoted, and what roles international institutions should play in this process, with a special focus on how private-public partnerships might act as catalysts in demonstrating scope here.
In essence, the challenge is to ensure access to and comprehensive dissemination of clean technologies across the world, and to ensure that these technologies can talk to both the challenge of industrial development without the risk of maximising global warming.
The challenge of managing climate change is not just a technological and economic one; it is also political. Whilst many of the world's leading economies are signatories to the UNFCC, important players such as the United States of America and Australia are not significant to the Kyoto Protocol. Therefore, they have recused themselves from the legally binding commitments of addressing this challenge.
The US is the leading polluter of the world. There can be no solution to this problem without her playing a central role. It is in this regard that recent acknowledgement of the challenge of global warming in the state of the union address by President Bush is to be welcomed.
The Kyoto Protocol comes to an end in 2012. At this stage, there has not been an appropriate forum and the goodwill to launch negotiations on a post- Kyoto agreement. One of the knots to be undone is the fact that some of the developing countries are increasingly emitting higher levels of greenhouse gases, and are now being pressurised to reduce their emissions. This is the case with China, India and ourselves. This goes against the principle of common but differentiated responsibility.
The second challenge would be to bring the US into the post-Kyoto framework. Thirdly, the global community will have to address the competing claims by polluting developed countries, which refuse to commit themselves to clean development as long as developing countries are still emitting. Together, we will have to find a solution to these challenges.
In the light of these challenges, it is difficult to find fault with the stance of our government. As this Parliament, we need to be united in supporting the government in its endeavour to take action on adaptation, in its promotion of clean development mechanisms in Africa and its fight for new thinking on technological transfer as well as the pursuit of a more effective global regime after 2012.
I think I should take this opportunity to inform the House that the environment and tourism committee is planning this year to take a trip to Australia to look at the carbon capture and storage facilities of Anglo- American, which is the leading company that is looking at clean development, and moving to ``a cleaner image''.
As the ANC, we would like to express our appreciation to the Interparliamentary Union for drawing our attention to this issue, so that we, as the nation in assembly, can profile what is one of the urgent challenges that we face - the sustainable reproduction of life on our planet. Thank you. [Applause.]