Special Report: Fight against Global Warming

    BEIJING, Dec. 21 (Xinhua) -- The international community in 2007 mobilized to fight the daunting challenge of global climate change, and has moved forward from awareness of the critical issue to negotiations and actions to face it.

    AWARENESS RAISED

    With the rapid development of industrialization, human beings are using more and more fossil energy, bringing not only wealth but also a huge amount of contamination and greenhouse gases.

    The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a new report on the phenomenon earlier this year, warning that the world's average temperature, if left unchecked, could rise by as much as 2 to 4 degrees centigrade by 2080.

    This could lead to a lack of drinking water for 1.1 to 3.2 billion people and famine for 200 to 600 million people besides endangering the lives of between 200 and 700 million with floods, the report said.

    It stressed there is no ground for doubting the fact that the earth is getting warmer, adding that the rate of climate change would accelerate if no efforts are made to reduce emissions.

    It also said human beings' activities are the major cause for climate change, which, if not controlled, will do serious harm to economies, societies and ecosystems worldwide.

    This report has rung the alarm bells for the world, raised our awareness of the negative impacts of climate change and aroused a worldwide debate on the issue.

    IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri said leaders and citizens across the world must now pay unprecedented attention to the climate change problem.

    NEGOTIATIONS LAUNCHED

    Since the beginning of 2007, a series of high-level international conferences have made climate change one of their key topics to echo the sounding alarm.

    Climate change was at the top of the agenda of the G-8 summit in Germany in June, a U.N. climate meeting in New York and the APEC meeting in Sydney, both in September, the East Asian Summit in Singapore and the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Uganda in November.

    Through comprehensive exchanges and negotiations, many countries have reached a variety of consensus, agreeing that negotiations on climate change should be carried out under the U.N. framework, adaptation to climate change should not be neglected, and technological development and fund input are key factors to tackle climate change.

    Although there are still many different views between developed and developing countries as well as among the developed countries themselves, the international community adopted the Bali Roadmap on December 15 after two weeks of exhausting bargaining and negotiations.

    The roadmap, agreed on by over 180 countries meeting in Indonesia's resort island of Bali, includes a clear agenda for the key issues to be negotiated up to 2009, including action for adapting to the negative consequences of climate change, ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, ways to deploy climate-friendly technologies and financing both adaptation and mitigation measures.

    U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed his welcome of the outcome of the climate change conference in Bali, saying the Bali Agenda achieves three objectives: launching negotiations on a global climate change agreement, agreeing to an agenda for the negotiations, and agreeing to complete them by 2009.

    He believes the Bali Roadmap is a pivotal first step toward an agreement that can address the threat of climate change.