Can the North and South get in step?

• Author: Dunn, Seth
• Position: Industrial and developing countries address climate change issue

While industrial nations have been dragging their feet, poor nations have been learning moves that will spur their development while countering climate change. But to pick up the pace, they'll need a helping hand - not finger-pointing - from their rich partners in the North.

Climate diplomacy took a David-and-Goliath twist in the closing days of the Kyoto summit last December. With the protocol negotiations teetering on the verge of collapse, U.S. Vice President Al Gore flew to Japan to address the historic gathering. Expectations were high that Gore, among the first to bring climate change into the political arena, would break the deadlock.

But Kinza Clodumar, president of the Republic of Nauru, outranked the vice president and was to speak first. His colorful robe bobbing in a sea of surrounding dark suits, Clodumar described a frightening future for his homeland - a tiny coral atoll island in the South Pacific that scientists believe is one of the nations most vulnerable to rising seas in a changing climate. Without immediate action by the industrial countries to curb their carbon output, he warned, Nauru will face "a terrifying, rising flood of biblical proportions." To allow the "willful destruction of entire countries and cultures," he argued, "would represent an unspeakable crime against humanity."

The Pacific Islander reserved special criticism for the world's top greenhouse gas emitter, urging Gore to abandon his government's hard-line position in the talks. "No nation has the right to place its own, misconstrued national interest before the physical and cultural survival of whole countries. The crime is cultural genocide; it must not be tolerated by the family of nations."

Clodumar's confrontation with Gore underscores an important trend in the climate debate over the last decade: Southern countries are growing increasingly assertive in challenging the sluggish steps of their more industrial neighbors in the North. While public attention has to date focused on the actions - and inaction - of industrial nations, developing countries have taken prominent roles in climate negotiations. Representing four-fifths of humanity, developing nations today comprise more than 80 percent of the signatories to the first international accord on climate change, the 1992 Rio treaty, and more than half of those to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

However, this greater Southern involvement in efforts to stave off global warming has been endangered in the past year by aggressive U.S. posturing and demands for additional commitments from developing countries to address their emissions. In July 1997, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution threatening to withhold support for any treaty that did not require developing countries to agree to legally binding commitments within the same time period as industrial nations. This resolution isolated the United States from the rest of the world, and made for strained North-South relations before and during the Kyoto negotiations. A subsequent U.S. State Department "diplomatic full court press" to achieve the "meaningful participation of key developing countries" so far has done little but draw fouls.

Despite their questionable intentions and poor timing, the awkward U.S. overtures to the South have illuminated a major challenge of the post-Kyoto debate: that of enabling both developing and industrial nations to play fair and equitable roles in the global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This challenge need not be framed in the antagonistic manner of the moment. Instead, the now-contentious "developing country issue" can be reframed and worked out in ways that will provide economic and environmental benefits for both North and South, and help stabilize the Earth's climate as well.

THE LOW END OF THE BOAT

For small island inhabitants, paradise is being stolen away by the ocean swelling of the last century, which scientists estimate has raised sea levels more than 18 centimeters. Between Tuvalu and the Bahamas, island elders speak of shrinking shorelines while scientists document other sea-level rise manifestations - erosion, inundation, salinization of freshwater supplies, property damages, lost tourism - with unusual frequency. Explained a Fiji hotel manager to the Christian Science Monitor in July, "I never believed in global warming before. Now I do because the tides flood the land not twice a year as before, but at any time." Should sea level rise another meter over the next century, as scientists project, several of these islands could be literally erased from world maps. Island cultures, bound to their homes for centuries, face the devastating prospect of forced migration as their land vanishes. Jorelik Tibon, the environment agency manager of the Marshall Islands, says that the country - a scattering of low-lying coral atolls - is at risk of completely disappearing: "Sea-level rise is something so horrible here that people just don't want to think about it, especially since there's nothing they can do to stop it."

Mass exodus is already a grim reality for poor populations along low-lying coasts, who face rising seas in concert with another signature of climate change: more frequent and extreme weather events. September's submersion of two-thirds of Bangladesh - the worst deluge in the country's history, resulting from record-long monsoon rains - left 21 million homeless. Yet scientists project that 70 million people will eventually be displaced as 18 percent of Bangladesh's land area is expected to be lost as the coast is further inundated. Hundreds of millions living in river basins face similar risks, like the 56 million refugees from August's deluge in China's Yangtze River basin - that nation's worst flooding in 44 years.

Like China, many developing nations occupy arid and semi-arid regions, making them particularly prone to experience the climate variables of drought, floods, fire, tropical disease, and heat waves. This is overwhelmingly revealed in a review of the past year's news headlines: forest fires and drought in Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico; floods, famine, and fevers in Africa; dry spells and torrential rains in India; heatwaves and water shortages in the Middle East; floods, drought, and and cholera in Latin America. Many of these situations persisted, or even worsened, well after the highly publicized El Nino weather phenomenon ended. For example, after El Nino Mexico's prolonged drought - the worst in 70 years - was followed by the country's most severe...