Climate change

The success of the Paris Agreement will depend on how soon the countries whose emissions have peaked achieve zero-emission levels; and how China, India and other developing countries define their urban future. It will also depend on developing a common understanding of whether technological changes alone will suffice and come quickly enough to meet the world's huge and growing need for energy, transportation, food, buildings and goods within a reframed urban transition.

The ideas and concepts which make up climate change can be viewed through the theory of meme, as developed by Richard Dawkins. This helps us understand how these ideas emerged from the scientific discourse and have permeated social life and action, being transmitted and transformed in this act. A better recognition of how these memes function will help us understand the manner in which climate change is perceived and acted upon.

India failed to put forward a well thought out, coherent and long-term climate strategy at the recent UN climate change conference in Delhi and missed an opportunity to jumpstart the climate change negotiations that have been stalled since the last important milestone at Kyoto, Japan five years ago.

The Kyoto Protocol, a UN treaty on climate change,very nearly given up as dead by even its most ardent promoters when US president George Bush abandoned it, has received a fresh lease of life in Bonn this week at the latest session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC-COP6) or the climate change conference. But how significant a contribution it will make, with its limited agreement and minus the US, to reducing greenhouse gases responsible for global warming, remains to be seen. Would the cause of global warming have been better served, for instance, if the Kyoto agreement had been allowed a quiet burial and work begun between individual countries on trading schemes and carbon taxes in its place?