The South is acting

Global scientists and the exper community are calling for a 20 per cent cut from 1990 levels of greenhouse-gas emissions by 2010. But, in reality, levels have increased by more than 12 per cent over the five years since the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was agreed in Rio. The debate seems to be increasingly shifting - and is sometimes manipulated - from scientific concerns and ecological imperatives to uncertainty about economics and the costs of taking actions. The enormous ecological cost of inaction has often been kept out of these calculations. So has the fact that many new jobs would be created from opportunities - such as the expansion of solar energy - arising from a de-carbonized economy