It was perhaps ironic that fierce storms lashed New York and the Philippines leading up to the Doha UN Climate Change Conference in December. The storm within the conference was to deliver three things: launching the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol; closing negotiations on the Bali roadmap or the Ad-hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action; and beginning work on a new global regime that is applicable to all countries.

Delivery fell far short. However, delegates did reaffirm the Kyoto Protocol, meaning that the existing climate targets remain until a new international agreement takes effect in 2020, pending a new pact to be agreed upon by 2015. Kyoto's expiration on January 31 would have meant the world was without a set of legally binding parameters to confront global warming.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry expressed China's satisfaction with the outcomes of the conference, saying that by maintaining the basic legal institutions of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Changes and its Kyoto Protocol, the talks sent out a positive signal globally. However, it added that developed countries lack the political will to reduce emissions and transfer technology and diluted their responsibilities at the conference. Those responsibilities included the pledge to secure $100 billion a year by 2020 in public and private financing to help poor countries cope with climate change - but between 2013 and 2020 no details of financial assistance were forthcoming. For China, sustainable development and poverty eradication remain urgent challenges and the country is already taking ambitious actions to reduce carbon emissions. In 2011, China incorporated concrete targets in addressing climate change in its 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15), which emphasizes green and low-carbon development.

African civil society groups under the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) attending the conference were disenchanted with proceedings and make the inequity clear that 70 percent of carbon dioxide from industrial sources is emitted by the 20 percent of the people living in developed countries - Africa, with its population of a billion people, contributes only 4 percent. They called on developed countries to commit to lowering temperature increases to the agreed level below 1.5 degrees centigrade and said a temperature rise of 2 degrees centigrade could have a devastating effect on agriculture, the mainstay of most African economies.

Of all the damage done by climate change in Africa, the impact on agricultural development, especially in West and Central Africa, is one of major concerns - leading to a massive risk for food security. Similar warnings are also delivered in the Chinese Government's Second National Assessment Report on Climate Change in 2012. Assuming no effective measures to counter global warming are implemented, the report says grain output in the world's most populous nation could fall 5-20 percent by 2050. With deadlines to decisions continually ignored, postponed or changed, ultimately nothing will be of any significance if the world we live in no longer has the ability to support life. After all, sustainable development requires a sustained planet.

THE EDITOR