Sustainability and policy - Climate Change: Biological and Human Aspects - page 448

The proclamation is memorable for one sentence included by the head of the
Chinese delegation, Tang Ke: 'We hold that of all things in the World, people are the
most precious'.
The declaration consisted of 26 principles in all. The UN Environment Programme
(UNEP) that arose as a consequence of the conference later adopted some of these.
The UNEP, you will recall (Chapter 5), was to be the UN agency under the auspices
of which (along with the UN World Meteorological Organization; WMO) the Inter-
governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established 16 years later. Of
relevance to anthropogenic climate change the declarations included nations must be
free to exploit their own resources, no nation should endanger others, compensation
is due if they do, each nation should plan its own population policy, non-renewable
resources must be shared by all and environmental concerns must not infringe human
rights. Today anthropogenic climate change is being caused mostly by the developed
nations and this is endangering others, through both climate change and sea-level rise.
Fortunately, for a number of the participating states, the UN conference's principles
are not enshrined in international law, for if they were there would undoubtedly be
severe economic repercussions. Conversely for others, at the sharp end of anthropo-
genic climate change, the principles provide no protection.
The conference's action plan consisted of 109 recommendations covering, albeit
broadly and loosely, all areas of environmental concern. Eighteen recommenda-
tions (numbers 1-18) related to human settlements, 51 recommendations (19-69) to
natural resources, 16 recommendations (70-85) to pollution generally, nine recom-
mendations (86-94) to marine pollution, seven recommendations to education and
culture (95-101) and eight recommendations (102-109) to environment and develop-
ment. Climate change was covered mainly by the general pollution recommendations
and much of the science to address this was either reviewed or conducted by the
WMO following the conference. However, recommendation 70, which called for
countries to consult with other nations before doing anything that might affect the
climate, has been an abject failure. This was recognised by many (well before the
1990 IPCC report), including the International Institute for Environment and Devel-
opment, whose briefing a decade on from Stockholm said that 'provisions for this
have become seriously unstuck ' (the italics represent the source's own emphasis;
Clarke and Timberlake, 1982). In July 1980 the UNEP wrote to all nations submit-
ting the provisions for co-operation in weather modification. A year later only nine
replies had been received, of which six were simply acknowledgements of receipt of
correspondence; just three accepted the proposals.
The decade following the conference saw the development of some climate models
that were basic by today's standards. It has to be remembered that at that time many
large computers used by industry and academia had less computer power than today's
home PCs. Indeed, up to 1982 PCs were extremely rare in homes and prior to 1980
they were virtually unheard of domestically. Those that became available early in the
1980s had memory capacities that were measured in kilobytes, not the gigabytes of
today. Similarly, the models that academics used were very elementary. Nonetheless,
back then most models predicted a rise of between 1.5 and 3 ◦ C for a doubling of
carbon dioxide (Clarke and Timberlake, 1982), which compares quite favourably
with the IPCC's first assessment in 1990 (IPCC, 1990). All of this demonstrates