Summit highlights gravity of the planet's problems
Date: 09-Sep-02
Country: SOUTH AFRICA
Author: Ed Stoddard
When it opened on August 26, Chinese workers were scrambling to contain the surging Yangtze River, and Czech police recovered the 16th body from floods that had ravaged the country - two events that many have linked to climate change.
As it wound down on Wednesday, Maryland state game officials were poisoning a murky pond to get rid of a predator from China that had infiltrated suburban Washington: the voracious, land-crawling snakehead fish.
On the same day, China's official Xinhua news agency reported that floods across the country in August had killed 1,532 people.
And as weary delegates packed their bags last week, millions of Muscovites were advised to stay indoors as thick smog from forest fires engulfed the city.
Scattered across the globe, these events are directly related to many of the issues raised at the mammoth talk-fest, which focused public attention, for a few days at least, on the gravity of the environmental challenges facing the planet.
"I think the summit has put environmental issues back on the public and political radar screen," said Steve Sawyer, climate policy director for conservation group Greenpeace.
"Summit waffle may spark greater awareness of planet's ills," read a headline in the Johannesburg-based Star newspaper.
The haze over Moscow is the product of up to 200 forest fires which have raged through one of the hottest summers on record - part of a warming trend that scientists say points clearly to climate change.
Floods from Europe to China highlighted the issue of global warming and renewed calls for a reduction in the emissions of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels that are seen as its chief cause.
But stiff opposition from the United States and OPEC countries shot down a European Union-led bid to have the summit set the world's first target for increasing the use of renewable energies such as solar and wind power.
ALIEN INVADERS
In Maryland, the slithering snakehead is one of many invasive species contributing to biodiversity loss - a major theme at the summit.
Snakeheads can wreak havoc in ecosystems outside their natural range, spending several days out of water in search of prey. They gobble up frogs, fish and small birds.
The snakeheads in Maryland were dumped in the pond by a local resident who bought them from a New York City market to make soup for a sick relative.
Invasive species, animals as well as plants, are often spread inadvertently by people who have acquired them for a variety of reasons.
In South Africa, the government is waging war on invasive plant species, sponsoring make-work projects to root them out and banning the import of many.
Alien plants choke out native ones and often suck up scarce water supplies at a much faster rate than local varieties.
The summit heard mounting evidence of a looming world water crisis, stemming from rising consumption, inefficient use, pollution, changing weather patterns, and invasive species.
Globally, 1.1 billion people lack access to clean drinking water and 2.4 billion people do not have adequate sanitation, according to U.N. estimates.
The summit did pledge to halve the proportion of people without sanitation by 2015, matching a similar goal made for drinking water two years ago.
Translating these and other lofty pledges into action will not be easy. But if nothing else, public awareness of the gravity of the situation has been raised.
"Governments have been put on notice and given a warning. The planet is in crisis," said Greenpeace's Sawyer.
