Lagos — The journey to Copenhagen has been long and tortuous for both the "Cast & Crew". The Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer in 1985 provided the initial platform and framework under which the Montreal accord was to be negotiated by attempting to define Countries' responsibilities for simultaneously protecting human health and the environment against the adverse effects of ozone depletion.

Enter the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer which represented a landmark international agreement designed to protect our cherished ozone layer. The Montreal Protocol stipulates that the production and consumption of compounds that deplete ozone namely; Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), Halons, Carbon Tetrachloride, Hydro Chlorofluorocarbon (HCFC) etc, were to be phased out by the dawn of the Millennium year 2000. Scientific theories and reports were replete with evidences suggesting that once emitted into the atmosphere, these ODS could significantly deplete the ozone layer that shields the planet from damaging radiations from the Sun. The Montreal Protocol was first signed in 1987 and had been substantially amended in 1990 and 1992. As the whole world continues to feel the heat of global warming and glaring warning signals stare us in the face, the "Montreal deal" seemed too little an effort, too late in the day and as such a more global and synergized approach was needed to form a "resistance army" to frontally deal with the extant reality of Climate Change and Global warming.

The United Nations quickly set up the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) -- to begin to explore what could be done to mitigate global warming and to adapt to whatever inevitable temperature increases we are stuck with. The UNFCCC was adopted on 9 May 1992 and opened for signatures a month later at the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and it entered into force on 21 March 1994, after receiving the requisite 50 ratifications. Presently the Convention now has almost secured universal membership. Since the adoption of the Convention, the Conference of Parties (COP) has continued to negotiate in order to fine tune decisions and conclusions that would advance its execution & these negotiations resulted in the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol at COP 3 (Kyoto, December 1997) which left many of its operational details unresolved.

Efforts to define these unresolved operational details had seen the COP hop from COP 4 (Buenos Aires, November 1998), COP 5 (Bonn, October/November 1999) to COP 6 (The Hague, November 2000). Several couple of cities had played host to the "Cast and Crew" of the "Climate Drama" and the next show would be staged in Copenhagen, Denmark in December 2009 and this explains why Copenhagen has been trying to outdo Obama as the buzzword in the last 6-months and the name Copenhagen will continue to echo and re-echo even in the next decade or two because any framework or protocol agreed and signed in Copenhagen would most likely direct the course of global development and industrial production in the next one or two decades. The UNFCCC gave birth to the Inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCCC) whose main activity is to provide at regular intervals, Assessment Reports of the state of knowledge on climate change globally by their various Working Groups peopled by hundreds of climate experts and officials. By 2001 the IPCC made a head way by unanimously arriving at a consensus: although the climate system was so complex that scientists would never reach complete certainty, it was much more likely than not that our civilization faced severe global warming.

This conclusion of the IPCC marked the acceptance of global warming and Climate change as extant realities of our time because Scientists had come to understand the most detailed things about how the climate could change during the next centuries and that these anticipated changes would depend mainly on what policies the global community would choose for its greenhouse gas emissions. Since then the IPCC, representing the conscience of the international community on the subject matter had passed a verdict that the world should as a matter of urgency & necessity take very pro-active steps to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The Clean Development Mechanism CDM, as the key ingredient of the Kyoto Accord, sought to allow massive investments in clean-energy projects such as wind farms and solar power stations in developing countries and earn carbon offsets in return which could be sold to help buyers in rich western nations meet mandatory emissions targets.

But the CDM had been hampered by bureaucracy & avoidable red-tape which could take up to 24 months to get approvals. A modified version of the CDM called Programme of Activities (PoA) had been test run by the United Nations and the PoA scheme sought to allow the simultaneous launch of identical emissions-reduction projects across a much wider user base in a single programme thereby lowering overall costs and easing the roll-out process. The PoA offered the promise of improving livelihoods and greatly expanding the reach and potential investment returns of the U.N.'s existing Clean Development Mechanism which would expire by 2012 and Copenhagen seemed pregnant with a legally binding treaty that would commit individual countries to making even more ambitious effort to cut greenhouse emissions post 2012.

By the dawn of the millennium, improved technology and abundance of data of many kinds had strengthened the conclusion that emissions arising from human activities were very likely to cause serious climate damage. The IPCC reaffirmed in their report published in 2007 that depending on what steps the global community took to restrict emissions, by the end of the century we could expect the planet's average temperature to rise anywhere between about 1.4-6°C, although only a small fraction of this warming had happened so far with long predicted effects already becoming visible the world over - more deadly heat waves, rising sea level, stronger floods and droughts, the spread of tropical diseases and the decline of sensitive species, change in ocean circulation, disintegrating ice sheets. Emerging evidences showed that the warming was itself starting to cause changes that would generate still more warming. Politicians were beginning to pay greater attention and the gentlemen of the press and other elites began to trust the scientists who had predicted back in the years that by the end of the century, the world would be warmer.

Some segment of the public did continue to doubt, supported by a few scientists and policy makers who still hold tenaciously to contrary views fueled by a combination of ideological conviction or sheer stubbornness like United States Republican Senator James Inhofe who has been a most vocal opponent of any legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by clinging on to the outdated theory of no "sound scientific" evidence that the world is suffering due to carbon emissions resulting from human activities. This tiny minority of Climate Change opposition had not deterred an ever increasing number of individuals, government, and corporate entities from realizing that something had to be done by taking some proactive effective steps at surprisingly little cost compared to the monumental cost of inaction!

Talking about action, European Union leaders seemed to have agreed an offer to put on the table during the much hyped global climate talks in Copenhagen this December after successfully managing an initial disagreement over how to split the huge "climate Debt" bill knowing that developing countries would need about 100 billion Euros a year by 2020 to battle climate change and It was calculated that the EU's portion of that amount to be somewhere between 40 percent. An excited British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said "I think this will be seen as one of the major breakthroughs that is necessary for us to get a Copenhagen agreement," after the EU came up with their Copenhagen Financial Obligation position at a summit in Brussels recently. Already, anti-poverty campaigners led by Oxfam suspected the western countries' "Climate compensation Money" would simply be drawn from existing aid commitments and they feared if rich countries stole from aid budgets to pay their climate debt, the fight against poverty would go into reverse gear.

In June 2009, the United States House of Representatives painstakingly passed a bill to reduce U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases blamed for global warming but their Senators appeared more ambitious with a pending bill that required U.S. manufacturers, utilities and refineries to reduce their carbon pollution output by 20% by 2020, from 2005 levels but opposition to such ambitious plans led by Republicans said the proposed climate-change bill would cause significant job losses by encouraging manufacturers to relocate their plants outside of the U.S , in countries that do not have strict carbon controls. Nevertheless, the Obama administration is hoping for more progress by Congress before the Copenhagen summit gets underway.

Stanley wrote from Abuja