Changing climate

To all intents and purposes, the Kyoto Protocol is dead, and unless urgent action is taken its successor, the Copenhagen process, may turn out to be dead on arrival or comatose. Kyoto never delivered reductions of CO2 emissions, but still binds 174 nations until 2012. Meanwhile, global greenhouse gas emissions have steadily increased since the reference year of 1990.

New negotiations for "Kyoto 2" must produce nothing less than the Perfect Agreement, to be followed by Perfect Implementation. The clear and present danger is that the Copenhagen process will deliver a compromise between nations that will fall far short of this ambition.

Deforestation

It is common knowledge in Bangladesh that our forests have been decimated in recent decades. Less apparent than the loss of forests is the loss of other goods and services that forests provide particularly to the neighbouring poor people whose well being and livelihoods depend on these forests.

Rural homesteads all over the country have vastly increased tree production in recent decades, but according to knowledgeable people the collective production of households will never be enough to meet the energy or construction needs of a fast growing population. Commercial fuel wood sellers hire the poor to comb through existing Reserve Forests and Protected Areas to extract whatever they can for sale. Brick-fields are constructed inside or next to Reserve Forests to use wood as a primary energy source. Details