The outcome of last week's United Nations' Geneva conference on global warming has proved to be more important and more stringent than had been anticipated, largely due to the unexpected swing in the attitude of the United States in favour of the preservation of this planet. Not only have some targets been set for a reduction in emissions of carbon dioxide, but agreement has been reached that the reductions should be legally binding on the industrialised nations.
The statement issued by the conference - henceforth to be known as the Declaration of Geneva - remains modest in its ambitions to curtail the emission of the so called greenhouse gases but it represents a significant step forward from the blander and unenforceable aspirations that issued from the earlier Rio conference. For the first time in international diplomatic circles there appears to be some solid governmental recognition of the scientific consensus that the risks of global warming are real and that action needs to be taken if the potentially catastrophic results of the greenhouse effect on this earth are to be avoided.
Not all countries are in agreement. Understandably, those nations with large deposits of coal or oil, whose economies may be significantly dependent. on these fuels, are unhappy with the Geneva conclusions. Australia - accused during the week of putting - more value on its coal exports to Japan than on future generations of Australians - has led much of the dissent, along with Russia and Saudi Arabia and some other members of OPEC. But this fossil fuel lobby has been largely frozen out of the final consensus. Its protestations have been understandable but given the very real hazards to the global climate - inexcusable.
Dissent from the Declaration of Geneva may prove one of the most serious obstacles to its implementation. Even when there has been near unanimity on the outcome of some recent United Nations conferences, the implementation of agreed recommendations has been non existent. Since the Cairo conference on population, for instance, governments which urged more resources for population related programmes have actually reduced their grants to such activities. What chance, then, of any significant diminution of greenhouse gas emissions when the manufacturers and exporters of fossil fuels dissent from the Declaration?
And many people may be, if not dissenters, ambivalent about the threat of global warming. How many have been heard to say, albeit jokingly, that global warming would be all right by them if we kept on having sunny summers? A more likely effect on the climate of this country, were the greenhouse effect to persist, could be a cooling of the climate if the flow of the Gulf Stream was to be altered. Ambivalence must give way to realistic concern and ways must be found of getting the dissidents in line with the broader consensus. This must be achieved, along with the details of a legally binding international agreement, by the time the parties meet again in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997. The planet cannot afford any further procrastination.