As a new decade begins, we look back on the first ten years of the 21st century and try to wrap our minds around its events and catch our breath after its rapid pace. According to a general consensus, the decade will be remembered, 9-11 and the recession aside, for the breakneck speed of technological advancement and world-scale social networking innovations, or ‘smart communication.’
Up there among the top issues of the past decade (or at least the last half of it) is the issue of climate change, and this issue will, without doubt, continue to influence business, political and social factors in the decade to come.
In fact, the last decade wrapped up with the occurrence of one of the most highly anticipated and over-rated climate change conferences ever, which had a rather anticlimactic finish. The Copenhagen Climate Change Summit ended in what many deem to be failure, with the Copenhagen Accord ‘recognizing’ the scientific evidence for the need to keep global temperatures below a 2 degree Celsius rise, but lacking binding commitments for emissions reductions and a clear-cut plan to achieve that goal.
The Accord includes previously announced greenhouse gas mitigation targets for both developed and major developing countries, and the pledge of $100 billion annually by 2020 by developed countries to assist developing countries, with priority given to those most in need. Major developing countries somewhat agreed that projects funded by outside aid should be subjected to some form of verification and reporting. The agreement also laid out a forestry plan which would provide cash in return for significant reductions in deforestation. But many details, especially regarding transparency, still have to be worked out.
Although many officials, with tempered optimism, uttered comments along the lines of, “a meaningful agreement” and “a vital first step”, President Obama confessed: “This progress is not enough. We have come a long way, but we have much further to go.”
So, as we remember coping with anxiety from the fallout of 9-11 and the ‘great recession’, and as we furiously tweet and text our lives away and connect with cyber suburbia, the environmental roundup of the past decade seems to consist of the issues of climate change sitting decidedly in the ‘unfriend’ category, with the world anticipating tough negotiations ahead, especially leading up to the next major climate conference at the end of 2010 in Mexico.
