(Yonhap Editorial) World environment summit must produce practical, feasible measures

SEOUL, Oct. 11 (Yonhap) -- Hundreds of mayors and environment experts from more than 100 cities across the world kicked off the Gwangju Summit of the Urban Environmental Accords (UEA) in Gwangju, South Korea, Tuesday in a bid to address the wide range of environmental issues facing cities around the globe.
During the four-day summit, hosted by the Gwangju metropolitan government, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the U.S. city of San Francisco, about 600 mayors, scholars and activists from some 130 cities and international organizations will discuss the roles cities can play in tackling environmental problems and global warming. In addition to plenary sessions, there will be four international conferences, including a UEA UNEP Youth forum and an International Conference of Union of Environmental Societies, held under the theme "Green City, Better City," in Gwangju, about 330 kilometers southwest of Seoul.
The UEA, signed in June 2005 by mayors from 52 cities to celebrate World Environment Day, has emerged as a hallmark of urban leadership's efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Greenhouse gas emissions are the major culprit of global contamination. Cities, which cover just 2 percent of the earth, are responsible for 70 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. In other words, the efforts of cities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are crucial to protect the globe from pollution.
The summit will delve into two major topics: developing a system to evaluate environmental policies and trying to revive a previous effort to set up an emissions trading framework.
Summit attendees will try to develop a practical and universal index to evaluate cities' eco-friendly policies. The existing standards are either outdated or do not consider the differences between developed and developing countries.
The other goal of the summit is to set up a framework for the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) as part of global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A joint study with the UNEP has been under way since 2007.
The CDM was created under the Kyoto Protocol as one of several ways to facilitate carbon trading in an effort to get cities to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The 1997 protocol obliges nearly 40 developed countries to reduce their emissions over a five-year period through the end of 2012 by an average of 5.2 percent from 1990 levels.
But the CDM has not led to a functional carbon trading system, and so summit attendees are hoping to discuss the agreement and hammer out a new framework for emissions trading.
At the end of the four-day summit, participants are expected to adopt the Gwangju Declaration and Gwangju Initiative to sum up the discussions. We hope that the declaration will contain practical and feasible ways to protect the global environment.
As noted above, countries around the world agreed in the Kyoto Protocol on the principles of reducing their respective greenhouse gas emissions, but their efforts have not been successful due to the lack of binding agreements.
The environmental crisis is nearing but countermeasures thus far have been insufficient. Therefore, the participants in the UEA summit should do their best to produce meaningful results.