A new dawn. This is our collective hope as we rise to meet the opening hours of Feb 16 - the historic day the climate treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol comes into force.

Crafted in the Japanese city bearing its name, the Kyoto treaty will become by Feb 16 a legally-binding global agreement which will obligate the world - beginning with developed nations - to make rapid and significant global cuts in greenhouse gas emissions in order to prevent the onset of dangerous climate change.

The Protocol is the first required step to protect the climate. Its entry into force is both a cause for celebration and at the same time a grave reminder that a lot more work needs to be done. The climate accord calls for an initial average of five percent cuts in greenhouse gas emissions globally, even though emissions reductions ranging from 50 to 70 percent are widely believed to be needed in a few decades if irreversible damage to the climate is to be prevented.

Climate change is considered by the global scientific community as the greatest environmental threat facing the planet today. Ironically, though caused mainly by the massive reliance of industrialized countries on fossil fuels such as coal and oil, climate change will hit developing nations the hardest in terms of loss of life and investments.

Severe impacts

Scientists are no longer discussing whether or not climate change will occur; they are today debating how severe the impacts will be if drastic action is not taken globally and immediately.

The 1990s remain the warmest decade in recorded history. Recent studies project that if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced dramatically and soon, the deadly heat wave which hit Europe in 2003 may occur every second summer by the latter half of the century.

Scientists anticipate warming temperatures to significantly fuel the intensity of extreme weather events such as droughts and storms. According to leading global insurance companies such as Munich Re, climate-change related damages might cost US$150 billion annually within only a decade.

Due to warming temperatures, up to 64 percent of China's glaciers are projected to disappear by 2050, putting at risk up to a quarter of the country's population who are dependent on the water released from those glaciers.

The British Antarctic Survey revealed recently that the massive West Antarctic Ice Sheet might be disintegrating, "an event which, if it happened completely, would raise sea levels around the world by 16 feet."

The impact such an event would have on the Philippines is obvious given the country's discontinuous coastline. Among the other impacts of climate change, besides rising sea levels, are rapidly declining agricultural yields and the spread of diseases such as malaria borne by insects that thrive in warm temperatures.

Hot air emitters

We all know what the problem is: burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil, which release to the atmosphere massive amounts of carbon dioxide, the main climate-wrecking greenhouse gas. And we know what we need to do: produce our energy from clean, safe, renewable resources. Unfortunately, those well-placed to ensure that solutions to the problem are used do not seem to be paying attention.

The Asian Development Bank and the World Bank remain the two largest emitters of hot air. Huge amounts of environmental rhetoric emanate from the two institutions each year and yet up to now, both continue to provide the overwhelming share of their resources to dirty energy projects.

Support from governments of countries in Southeast Asia played an important role in determining the Kyoto Treaty's content and final shape. And yet today, Southeast Asian governments have degenerated into a party devoted to negating the Protocol's promise by forcing despised coal plants on small communities, which continue to reject dirty power and which have long demanded clean energy.

The European Renewable Energy Council has shown that with the right support policies from government, renewable energy from wind, geothermal, small hydro, modern biomass and solar power can provide 50 percent of global energy supply by 2040. Traditional energy economists say that renewable energy is too expensive and that we can't afford to develop it. The truth is we cannot afford not to.

The Kyoto Protocol will come into force despite persistent attempts by the hooligan governments of the US and Australia to undermine the climate treaty. This fact should remind us once again that concerted action can yield fruit and that big or small, populous, powerful, or frail, each country and each individual has a role to play in redirecting our planet away from its present deadly course. After all, as a great reminder goes, if the world were a huge airplane about to crash, would it really matter that you were seated in first class?

The task of taking back the pilot's cockpit from those who have hijacked our plane of a planet must be our number one priority.

RED CONSTANTINO is the regional energy campaigner of Greenpeace in Southeast Asia. He is currently in Kyoto covering with global civil society the gathering organized by the UN marking the entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol.