Climate change meet underway in Madrid

Officials of the nations of the world are now in Madrid, Spain, for the 25th session of the Conference of Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The first world conference on climate change (COP1) was held in 1995 in Berlin, Germany, followed in succeeding years by meetings in other cities around the world. It was at COP21 in 2015 in Paris, France, that the Philippines played a key role in the discussions, with the severe damage from super-typhoon Yolanda seen as a stark demonstration of worsening natural disasters, resulting from climate change.

At the end of the Paris conference, the various nations of the world submitted national programs they hope to carry out to help meet the overall goal of limiting the rise in world temperature to less than 1.5 degrees over pre-industrial levels.

Since the Paris conference, several scientific studies have been made on worsening conditions around the world — the atmosphere getting hotter due to increasing carbon emissions from the world’s industries, consequently melting the polar glaciers and raising ocean levels that are now threatening many cities located in bays and other water areas, like Venice in Italy.

Climate change is blamed by scientists not only for the rising ocean levels but also for the heat waves causing forest fires in the US, the vast Amazon forest in Brazil, and Australia, as well as the increasingly powerful typhoons and hurricanes arising out of the world’s oceans.

The Philippines is specially vulnerable to all the changes in the world’s climate and our delegation to COP 25 in Madrid should be able to report that while we still have to rely heavily on high-polluting coal to generate electricity, we are taking great strides in the development of renewable energy, notably solar and wind, as we solve problems involved in the production, storage, and distribution of these new sources of energy.