Former Vice President Al Gore and Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai mapped out a strategy Monday for achieving a new U.N.-backed global warming treaty next year by doing more to protect tropical forests.
The two Nobel Peace Prize winners, calling attention to deforestation blamed for a fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, aimed their comments at world leaders converging for the U.N. General Assembly. They hoped to pave the way for billions of dollars in new spending to attack illegal logging.
"Forty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said about justice, famously, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And in that same sense we live in a new reality in which increased CO2 emissions anywhere represent a threat to civilization everywhere," Gore said. "And one of the most effective things that we can do in the near term to reduce the emissions of global warming pollution is to halt this totally unnecessary deforestation."
Chopping down trees to make way for more farmland or development contributes to climate warming two ways: It eliminates plant material that absorbs carbon dioxide, and it releases the dead wood into the atmosphere as more carbon.
Maathai urged whoever is elected to succeed President Bush to persuade richer industrialized nations to reward developing nations for conserving and expanding their remaining forest cover.
"This country is the one we are waiting for to provide the leadership," she said.
Gore won the prize last year for focusing attention on climate change as captured in his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." Maathai won the prize in 2004 after founding Kenya's Green Party in 1987 and focusing on planting trees.
The U.N. hopes to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol regulating emissions of 37 industrial countries with another climate accord at a meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009. Last year, a U.N. panel of scientists said climate change is happening, and the earth's temperature would continue rising even if carbon emissions were cut to zero today because of accumulating warming gases in the atmosphere.
But they warned of possible catastrophic effects unless emissions peak within the next 10 to 15 years and then decline sharply.
The U.S. rejected the Kyoto accord, arguing it would harm American business and didn't require similar cuts by China, India and other emerging economies. But those developing countries have refused to accept a binding arrangement that would limit their development.International Herald Tribune
