The issue that Gore is raising is a very serious issue that could have grave consequences for a country like Nepal that has few technological and other necessary resources to tackle them.

But I don’t know what can be done within Nepal itself to address some of these environmental issues, especially given the fact that they are vastly global in nature and in terms of their origins.

The Kyoto Protocol, international treaty adopted in 1997, setting concrete targets for developed countries to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change is a supplementary treaty to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and came into force in February 2005. More than 130 countries are party to it, with this figure set to rise. The list of parties, however, currently does not include the United States, indeed.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, developed countries are subject to legally binding commitments to curb their emissions of the six main greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulphur hexafluoride. The targets, based mostly on a 1990 baseline, range from an 8 per cent reduction for most European countries to a 10 per cent increase for Iceland. They must be achieved by the commitment period 2008-2012. Developing countries are only subject to general commitments.

The Kyoto Protocol is a flexible treaty, letting individual governments decide what specific policies and reforms to implement to meet their commitments. It also allows countries to offset some of their emissions by increasing the carbon dioxide absorbed, or sequestered, by trees and other vegetation. However, eligible sequestration activities, and the amount of offsetting allowed, are tightly controlled.

Yes, indeed, it’s the ‘developed’ world who have to contribute so that we do not have an unwanted melting of the glaciers.

Your title page banner “Can you see beyond our pretension?” clearly and vividly reflects Samudaya’s vision- one that of a horse with blinds- an untruthful and dubious assertion of a right to something.

(I am posting this here as it has no particular reference to any post).

Nanda ji

You have raised a very interesting question—what about global environmental issues in Nepal’s local context?

I don’t have any answer to that but I do have a parable to share.

It goes like this:

A PHD candidate for Anthropology at Tribuvan University is writing a thesis on the ethnic people of hills around the Kathmandu Vallye — the ‘Tamangs’. Theme of his research was to answer confounding questions such as —why do these people live at the top of the hills, where cultivating lands as well as grazing pastures for animal are scarce, they would have to walk for hours to get to the nearest spring just to get a pail of water and yet worse walk for days to get to the nearest health post?

On his quest, he hikes to one of the hills around the valley, as his subject he selects an old ‘Tamang Baje’ for his questionnaire, hoping that he would be deluged with wisdom of old guy squatting on ‘khet ko alli’ smoking his ‘biddi’.

So, he finally puts his question to the old guy, WHY here? WHY not down there to the plains?

The old guy says while billowing the smoke out of his nostrils—’Gai-ro ma bas-ne lai pai-ro ko daar, dado ma bas-ne lai lado ko daar!!’

Thus, the moral of the story is— all the policy makers at Koyoto or wherever, are not ever going to understand the local needs meanwhile all the locals at Amazon/Kalahari/Mongol plains or where ever they might be are not ever going to comprehend the global environmental concerns.

I think, Koyoto protocols to Nepalis are like proposing ‘Tamang Buda’ on the hill to move to lower grounds.

this last post got me so fired up that i finally succumbed to the pressure to figure out the typekey bs and log in.

first - my rant - type key and all associated pains suck. if samudaya is a forum for nepali expression, why the extra hurdle of a username, password, email activation etc. what gives, admin?

i concede that you all started the site and work hard on the upkeep. however, by starting such a site, and webmasters are on constructive notice of this, you take the risk that users will take a certain control out of your hands no matter what your bylaws say.

your typekey stunt is chilling nepali free expression because people (are lazy and) wont sign up to post and thus we lose content.

i will say no more on this matter.

of kyoto and climate change:

words from rio - think globally act locally

or the words they have become: think locally, act locally.

there is but one earth, and it is becoming increasingly more difficult to avoid the signs of a warming globe.

the glaciers of nepal are melting. my family is from a village near taplejung, and the villagers want to know why the mountainside is bare? where is the snow they asked me last time i was in nepal. they want to know the causes and what they can do.

of course, northern nations are the major offenders and the us being chief. however, the locals where effects are felt - polynesia, micronesia, greenland - they do know that their lives are changing. rising water levels are a bitch when you are on a small island.

the concept of ‘internationalisation of the amazon rain forest’ is real but it is also necessary. it gives the masses something to identify with. something they can cite when they need to show their limited concern on a concept they do not fully comprehend but know is important. shit, it’s on the news.

so it’s not cool to say that policy makers do not understand local concerns. remember they have some place they call local too. and its even more stupid to say that local people in the hills, forests, islands, do not understand a global phenomenon - they only have to understand the local which is always an indispensable part of a larger whole.

remember to recycle ugra, and use a cloth discloth and napkin. you’ll be helping the world and not even know it.

take a walk in the wild if you can. piss in the woods. climb a tree. kick some rocks. kick start your life out of lethargy.

Ugre’,

Your Tamang buda parable is na cheuko na tuppo ko. Implicitly, you supposedly refer to some Nepali field-technician’s anecdote and reduce the global environmental issue to an acutely local literary concoction which might or might not even be valid. I mean, that Tamang buda’s hill-billy experience aside, to draw further corollary of Kyoto protocol to some half-ass ‘conventional wisdom’ and then to conclude the disconnect between environmental policymakers and native dwellers is actually implying that it is almost impossible to bridge the existent gap.

Stay with me, I am sure you’d agree that just the manner in which global cultural homogenization has been sweeping the geographical south, is it really difficult to comprehend a global mass movement against some environment altering process, all the while educating the natives, which to begin with assumes their lack of knowledge and experience of/with the land they live in, an arrogant presumption on part of policymakers I concur, but still, is quite attainable sooner than later, me thinks

Of course, your parable is cute, if that is what you intended by posting it, but as far as providing any argumentative thrust to your ‘moral of the story’ is concerned, which I find more legit and valid by the way, I’m afraid bro, it totally lacks that oomph!

I will try to make it short, would love to whet my horn with you guys but, absolutely no time this week, shit load of work and I could have dropped few lines at lunch time but firewall at my work won’t let ‘type key’ thingy through it.

resonabledoubt:

“take a walk in the wild if you can. piss in the woods. climb a tree. kick some rocks. kick start your life out of lethargy.”

I will try my best to graciously heed your advice — trudge through woods and piss around and climb some trees. But, I am little confused with the order of actions that you have suggested me to do— is it first piss on the tree and climb it or climb it first and piss from the top? I think, doing former gives a local perspective and the latter gives the global perspective from the higher altitude.

About lethargy, well, I run for annual 10K run at my city and the cities around me, have made two trips at Tamur, rafting, which runs through your home district of Taplejung. So, I don’t see, relieving myself in the wild would give me any new perspective. Save your advice for the ones, who has never crossed ‘Thankot’ check post.

Mysticwa:

Thank you, for articulating my thoughts and putting them into perspective, I couldn’t have said it better, out of all epiphanies, you do it better than anyone else with alta-ego and bloated attitude.

Note: When I have more time I will debate on the issue.

Recent reports indicate that the Nepali Himalayas warmed about 1 degree Celsius since 1970s, almost twice the global average, affecting hundreds of glaciers and glacial lakes (World Heritage Center and Greenpeace).

It said that the rise in temperature has resulted in the retreat of 67 percent of Himalayan glaciers, posing risk of outburst flood. This could snowball into economic threat since the region is largely agricultural. 125 world heritage sites have been threatened by climate change, including 19 glacier sites and seven coral reefs worldwide.

The petition to have Everest put on ‘In danger list’ was also backed by Sir Edmund Hillary. The sites in question are Mount Everest and Sagarmatha National Park (glaciers) in Nepal, the Peruvian Andes (glaciers), Waterton glacier international peace park in the US and Canada and the Great barrier and Belize barrier (coral) reefs.

The pleas to prevent glacial lakes bursting in the Himalayas and Peru have not been taken up by the World Heritage Committee of the UNESCO, but it has accommodated the US and Canadian governments’ well known skeptical positions on climate change. It has also ignored the importance of countries significantly reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. It, however, agreed with the US demands to delete reference to the Kyoto protocol.

It has endorsed a ‘world heritage and climate change strategy’ whish focuses on the impacts, but not on the causes of the problem. The issue is reportedly to be debated at the 2007 UNESCO assembly.

The US has five percent of the world’s population, but produces 25 percent of the world’s global warming pollution.

The Bush administration has not offered any indication that it will accept the terms of the Kyoto Protocol, which has been ratified by 163 nations, because it believes that the treaty to reduce CO2 emissions would put a strain on the economy, resulting in a decline in GDP.

still awaiting the pundit’s rejoinder. it has been almost 3 weeks, and i don’t think it is unreasonable for me to believe that the pundit is finally, silently, conceding a point that needs no debate.

reasonabledoubt,

honestly, too tired to go thru what i said, for that matter what you said.
if you think samudaya is an amphitheater, where you wield your sword until the last gladiator
standing, then i concede you are the Mars.

mitra! send me your mailing address, honestly, i will send you your laurel wreath, do walk around with it on your head, if possible send us some pictures!!

PS: you scare me, no one has ever waited so eagerly for my reply, counting days…

i don’t want to offend or flatter you, and i am not going to go through what i already said. however, your comment was the proximate cause of my laboring with typekey so as to post on samudaya (see above), and i do want to finish debating this issue. sorry.

i thought i made a good point. you replied without much substance, and then asked for time to discuss the matter at a time more convenient to you.

maybe you need more time. maybe i should, like caesar, call for a laurel wreath. red herrings aside, you shouldn’t post if you aren’t prepared to defend. after all, inactive pseudo-intellectuals like me await posts like yours to see if there is chance for a real dialogue on a pertinent topic.

most of the time i’m not offended when the substance peters early. however, when someone like you takes time to submit something somewhat thought out (don’t mean to flatter you), and then when challeged, can mount nothing more than witticism, i am disappointed.

…once again…your mailing address please!

your wreath has begining to wither…

get off my back mr. intellectual, fall can be paralytic for life

dissapointment my ass!!

maybe it’s time to take one of your runs, rafts past the thankot checkpost. try a new sport: it’s called suicide.

please send my laurel wreath to:

M**o L*** K*a
P.O. Box 69
Kathmandu, Nepal

to dear departed soul:

i did send your wreath to the following address:

M**o L*** K*a
P.O. Box 69
Kathmandu, Nepal

and this is what i got in reply:

dear Ugra ji,

we haven’t heard from our beloved M*r* L**o K*a for ages, last we heard was, that he was into a new sport called ‘suicide.’ we suspect he got washed out by glacial melt down in ‘taplejungj.’

thank you, for the wreath, if not in victory, quite timely for funeral.

you are a thoughtful man to have chosen such an apt gift for the occasion, will hang ‘it’ around his picture.

yours sincerely
M*r* L**o Kha ko Baa

OM SOOHAA!!!!

now that’s funny!!! well done. i laugh and concede.

Funny, indeed!

post 9.

The widely varying views also explain the differences of opinion about the adequacy of the actions already taken. It does not benefit any single nation to take action unless it can be assured others will act likewise. The disadvantages of being a ‘first mover’ explain why the subject has to be dealt with at the international level, initially through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, and subsequently at the Conference of Parties in Kyoto in 1997. The Kyoto Protocol, which emerged from the 1997 conference and came into force in February 2005, is the first agreement under the UNFCCC with greenhouse gas emission reduction targets that is binding in international law. Developing countries argued that they had no responsibilities to cut emissions because the industrialized countries were the main emitters of greenhouse gases. Unsurprisingly, not many nations met their voluntary targets.

The Kyoto Protocol sought a 5.2 per cent reduction in overall (carbon-equivalent) greenhouse gas emissions by about 2010 relative to 1990. This target applies collectively to industrialized economies only. Once again, developing countries have no mandatory targets. The target is differentiated between industrialized countries. The European Union (EU) as a whole must achieve an 8 per cent reduction, the United States 7 per cent, and Japan 6 per cent. Within the EU a separate agreement allocates the 8 per cent cut between member states.

Critics of the Kyoto Protocol point to the very slow pace of ratification and to the fact that even if the 2010 targets are met, very little happens to projected rates of global warming. The reason is that developing countries’ growth rates of emissions are very much higher than in the developed world. So far, developing countries have refused to adopt emission reduction targets. If they continue to refuse to do so, little will happen to change the rate of global warming. Indeed, it is a pity and scary to see the beautiful glaciers melting. Cho Rolpa scares me.