Global Warming, Sustainable Development and WTO

Beginning of article

It is a known fact that the global temperature will increase 10[degrees]C in the next 100 years for which the sea level will increase 6 meters in the next 100 years. The increase in green house gases like CFC, HCFC, C, C[H.sub.4], and C[O.sub.2] are the factors of global warming. The effects of global warming are numerous such as: it will destroy eco-system of sea, coral formation, vanish national park of Alaska, Florida Panthar, Himalaya, and destroy the world ecosystem. Global warming has a great effect on agricultural productivity which will decline in several regions that can hamper food security of the world. The earth's climate is driven by solar radiation. In the long term, the energy absorbed from the sun must be balanced by outgoing radiation from the earth and the atmosphere. Part of this outgoing energy is absorbed and reemitted by radiative atmospheric gases, thereby reducing net emission of energy to space. To maintain the global energy balance, both the atmosphere and the surface will warm until the outgoing energy equals the incoming energy. This is the greenhouse effect. In 1827 Fourier conceived the theory of the green house effect. Arrhenius published in 1896 a analysis of possible climate change caused by industrial emissions of radiatively active gases. Early in the 20th century there was a lively scientific debate on whether atmospheric carbon dioxide would increase and lead to warming, or decline and lead to cooling. Carbon dioxide accumulations were first raised as a national concern in the United States in a 1965 report of the President's Science Advisory Committee. In the 1970s attention switched from greenhouse warming to the possibility of global cooling, motivated in part by a cooling trend that began about 1940. By the early 1980 fears of global warming had revived, again partly because temperatures indicated an end to the cooling trend. By the middle of the 1980s a number of national and international and 4.5[degrees]C (and possibly higher) by some time in the 21st century which was reported by the Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee 1983.

The main greenhouse gases which are shown in the Table-1 differ in the intensity of their heat trapping (or radiative forcing) and atmospheric lifetimes and thus in their ability to affect the radiative balance of the earth. CFC and nitrous oxide are many times more potent than the same quantity of carbon dioxide or methane.

Future trends in green house gases concentrations depend on number of factors--economic growth, the energy intensity of production, and the chemistry of the atmosphere, biosphere, and ocean-not all of which are fully understood. Nonetheless, as the recent scientific assessment by the intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emphasized the direction is clear. Sometimes in the next century, heat trapping (or radiative forcing) from increases in greenhouse gases is likely to reach a level equivalent to a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations over their pre-industrial level.

The International Climate Policy

The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 declared that in poor countries, (i) diarrheal diseases that result from contaminated water kill about 2 million children and cause about 900 million episodes of illness each year, (ii) Indoor air pollution from burning wood, charcoal, and dung endangers the health of 400 million to 700 million people, (iii) dust and soot in city air cause between 300000 and 700000 premature deaths a year, (iv) soil erosion can cause annual economic losses ranging from 0.5 to 1.5 percent of GNP, (v) a quarter of all irrigated land suffers from salinisation, (vi) tropical forests- the primary source of livelihood for about 140 million people --are being lost at a rate of 0.9 percent annually. Besides that concern over ozone depletion continues to grow. The consequences of loss of bio-diversity and of greenhouse warming are less certain but are likely to extent far into future and to be effectively irreversible.

The conference set forth Agenda 21 for the next century in which the three agenda relate to protect the environmental degradation which are given below;

* Supporting governments in their attempts to remove distortions and macroeconomic imbalances that damage the environment;

* Providing finance to protect natural habitat and biodiversity;

* Investing in research and development of non carbon energy alternatives to respond to climate change.

Moreover, UN stressed on the linkage between global environment and development, discourse of species protection and natural resource management including early international efforts on species protection, intensified multilateral action based on common interest and goals on environment and sustainable development.

The first evidence that CFCs might not be benign emerged in the early 1970s. In 1977 the U. S. Congress banned CFCs in aerosols. The ban stimulated development of alternative technologies at lower costs than predicted, allaying fears that a phase out of CFCs would be impossible or prohibitively costly. The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, signed in 1987, is a path breaking international agreement dealing with an environmental "global bad". The protocol aims to control consumption, and hence emissions, of CFCs and related substances that deplete ozone.

Before the Kyoto Protocol, there was an assessment of global carbon dioxide emissions which was given below in the Table-2.

Country                            Total      Average      CO2
                                 emission     growth       emission
                                from Fuels    rate         (ton of
                                and cement    percentage   Carbon)
                                manufacture   per year     Percapita
                               (million ton   1980-89      1989
                                  carbon)

                               1965   1989

Low income                      203    952           5.8        0.32
China                           131    652           5.9        0.59
India                            46    178           7.0        0.21
Middle-income                   373   1061           2.3        0.70
Lower middle income             176    478           2.3        0.70
Upper middle income             198    583           2.3        1.38
Low and middle income           576   2013           3.8        0.50
Subsharan Africa                 12     61           4.9        0.13
East Asia and the pacific       157    837           5.7        0.54
  South Asia                     47    201           7.0        0.18
Europe                          191    391           1.0        2.00
Middle East and North Africa     37    189           4.3        0.76
Latin America and the            97    258           1.2        0.61
  Caribbean
Other economies                 535   1089           2.0          --
High income                    1901   2702           0.5        3.26
Germany                         178    175          -1.2        2.82
Japan                           106    284           1.0        2.31
UK                              171    155           0.1        2.72
US                              948   1329           1.0        5.34
World                          3012   5822           1.8        1.12

Country …