While the threat may not be insurmountable, has indeed made it society wake up to the fact that we can no longer carry on with our present patterns of profligate production and consumption. We are messing up at a very rapid pace the planet’s life support systems. The global climate, as one of these life systems, is in for change, no matter how soon the economies of the world reduce their fossil fuel consumption or cutting of forests.

Fortunately, signs of growing global action to ward-off this threat are also becoming more evident than ever. Increasingly, the major polluters are using both command-and-control and market-based mechanisms to contain their greenhouse gas emissions. The G8, a grouping of the world’s 8 most developed nations with almost half of the global emissions, have agreed to consider halving the global emissions by the year 2050. Developing countries such as China and India are already taking bold steps and demanding that incentives, rather than binding commitments, may be the proper way of helping them reduce their GHG emissions. The thirteenth Conference of Parties of the UNFCCC in December 2007 at Bali, Indonesia will be witness to the frenzy with diplomats and negotiators of more than 180 countries trying to bring about a global agreement.

But will these efforts be enough? This question remains controversial, depending fundamentally on nature’s thresholds to react to the changing atmospheric composition due to increased carbon accumulation and human resilience to these changes. In simpler terms, it also means ‘how much climate change is acceptable to human society?’ Most of us now seem to be agreeing on the 20 C temperature rise threshold. But even this will result in loss of several species of flora and fauna.

Even though developing countries will bear the bulk of the brunt of climate change, it is recent events like Hurricane Katrina in the US and heat waves in Europe that have brought home the importance of adaptation. It is now clear and fairly well accepted that we need to evolve ways to live with and respond to the climatic changes inevitably taking place across the globe. Countries like India and Africa will need to do so, vigorously and urgently. They should, therefore, be the ones taking the lead in advancing the Nairobi Work Programme on Impacts, Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change and force the developed countries to fork out the 28-67 billion dollars required for adaptation in these countries.

It is also becoming fairly clear that adaptation and mitigation efforts would largely overlap because both depend on the adoption of the sustainable development trajectories. With this overlap, it is also becoming clear that resources devoted for one could also be used for the other. A good example of this is the carbon market which though established to facilitate mitigation is also providing incentives for measures that contribute significantly to community development and vulnerability reduction. Most of such opportunities will come from our efforts to save, reuse and recycle our resources. This will be true for things as basic as water and as complex as petrochemicals and sophisticated electronics. To a certain extent, GHG reductions from these efforts will be minute at the individual level and will need to be aggregated in order to make a sizeable bundle for trading in the carbon market. An excellent example of this is the Vertical Shaft Brick Kiln Cluster Project by Development Alternatives, that reduces GHG emissions in brick production at more than 120 sites and utilizes the carbon revenues for community development measures such as sanitation facilities and health and safety of the workers at the brick production sites.

The convergence between mitigation and adaptation will be best possible with large-scale sustainable livelihoods and sustainable lifestyles. This would require appropriate technologies, efficient resource management and effective institutions. Social enterprises like Development Alternatives, that have set up financially self-sustaining systems to promote these on a large scale will, therefore, become all the more important since they will be ones to bridge the funding opportunities at the global level (e.g., the carbon market) and action at the community level. q