News Home Page Costa Rica Latin America Sections Special Reports Travel/Tourism Real Estate Business Health The Internet Letters Opinion Columnists Leisure EroTica Entertainment The Take! Learn Spanish Photos Editorial Letters Opinion Columnists Public Forum Who We Are About Us Contact Us Advertise with us Subscribe to our Newsletter Links Page     SPECIAL REPORTS - Friday 25 February 2005 < Back   Send this Page To a Friend CLIMATE CHANGE: Colombia Gearing Up to Do Its Bit Constanza Vieira BOGOTA,  (IPS) - Colombia is set to begin systematically measuring the impact of climate change on its remarkably diverse territory, which ranges from Caribbean and Pacific coastal regions to snow-capped Andes mountains and tropical Amazon rainforest, in compliance with the Kyoto Protocol. A five-year Integral National Adaptation Pilot Project (INAP), to be designed this year and to go into effect in early 2006, will be ”the first climate change adaptation project in the world,” according to Colombian officials. ”Everyone will be closely watching our methodology,” Minister of the Environment, Housing and Territorial Development Sandra Suárez told IPS. The project will involve documenting trends and impacts and evaluating the foreseeable consequences of climate change, with particular attention to the highly vulnerable ecosystem of the ”páramos” or high plateaus and the Andes mountain glaciers. Adaptation measures will also be designed to confront the effects of rising sea levels on the country's Caribbean islands and islets, as well as the potential spread of tropical diseases like malaria and dengue to the much cooler mountainous regions where most of Colombia's 44 million people live. ”Greenhouse gases” like carbon dioxide, primarily produced through the burning of oil, gas and coal, trap heat in the earth's atmosphere, causing global warming. Scientists estimate that average temperatures on the planet could rise between 1.3 and two degrees Celsius over the next century. The resulting effects will include the melting of glaciers and icebergs, a rise in the sea level, an increase in the intensity and frequency of both droughts and rains, and life-threatening changes to the habitats of animals and plants. Colombia's INAP will be funded in part by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), which recently approved financing for projects focusing on the transition from the climate change impact evaluation phase to the stage of formulating and implementing adaptation measures. (GEF is an interagency project established in 1990 by the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environmental Programme.) Colombia ratified the Kyoto Protocol -- which went into force on Feb. 16 -- in 2000. According to the country's first national report on climate change, published in 2001, Colombia is responsible for 0.25 percent of global emissions of carbon dioxide, one of the six greenhouse gases that the Protocol is aimed at curbing. The most dramatic impact of global warming for this South American nation will be the consequences for its freshwater system. Experts say that Colombia has more rivers than the entire continent of Africa, with hydroelectric reserves estimated at close to 90,000 megawatts. According to official projections, if average temperatures continue to rise at the current rate, 78 percent of the country's mountain snow cover will be lost in just 45 years, along with 56 percent of the páramos, which are the source of most of Colombia's major rivers and thus often referred to as ”water factories”. As a result, climate change not only implicates the loss of the country's extraordinarily rich biodiversity, but also of a large part of its valuable natural resources, particularly its water, according to the state-run Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies (IDEAM), the agency responsible for the INAP project. The Kyoto Protocol commits the 35 industrialised nations that have ratified it to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to levels 5.2 percent lower than in 1990, by a deadline of 2015. But scientists warn that such a modest goal falls far short of what is needed to mitigate the climate change impacts already being felt. If the Kyoto targets are not increased and expanded, the sea level will have risen 40 centimetres in the Caribbean by the middle of the century, causing floods along 64 percent of Colombia's Caribbean coastline, which stretches 1,600 kilometres. This prospect raises fears, for example, with respect to tourism and transportation infrastructure on Colombia's San Andrés island in the Caribbean, which has a population of 85,500. The rise in sea level will also submerge the keys and islets that help mark the limits of Colombia's territorial waters and exclusive economic zone, endangering the country's sovereignty over an area measuring hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. In addition, the marine and land ecosystems of the San Andrés archipelago will be seriously affected, ”with devastating implications for migratory birds and especially the coral reefs, where 65 percent of the fish species found in the Caribbean breed,” the IDEAM reported last week. Along Colombia's sparsely populated 1,300-kilometre Pacific coastline, the sea level is projected to rise by an estimated 60 centimetres, leading to the risk of medium to high floods. The INAP project, which will also receive financing from Japan's Policy and Human Resources Development Fund (PHRD), will cost a total of 12.25 billion dollars and involve the efforts of four Colombian ministries. In the meantime, there have been 45 private sector projects submitted for approval under the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which represent the potential reduction of 70 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions, according to the Ministry of the Environment. The CDM is one of the Protocol's ”flexible mechanisms”, which allow the industrialised nations to partially fulfil their greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets by funding clean development or ”carbon sink” projects in the developing South. The proposed projects cover a range of sectors, including power generation and energy efficiency, alternative fuel sources, transportation, solid waste disposal and forestry. Even before the Kyoto Protocol entered into force, Colombia had signed two agreements for the sale of greenhouse gas emission reduction credits, both with the World Bank's Prototype Carbon Fund (PCF). The agreements involve the credits issued for the Jepirachi wind park in the desert region of the northeastern department (state) of La Guajira, and the Amoyá hydropower plant in the central department of Tolima. The next agreement, also with the World Bank, will most likely be related to a biogas project at the wastewater treatment plant in Riofrío, in the northeastern department of Santander. Colombia has signed memoranda of understanding with the Netherlands, Canada, France and Spain, and is set to sign another with Austria, all countries that are committed to curbing greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. The memoranda are aimed at matching submitters of CDM project proposals with potential investors in those countries. The Ministry of the Environment's climate change mitigation office has been designated as the agency responsible for negotiating agreements under the Protocol. Juan Pablo Bonilla, the former Colombian deputy minister of the environment, is a member of the global CDM Executive Board. Colombia also offers tax breaks to industries that invest in equipment for projects that can result in the trading of emission reduction credits. The sectors that have given rise to the largest number of CDM project offers are mining and energy, mass transit, solid waste disposal and certain agribusiness activities.