With the international community focusing on the critical U.S. and Chinese commitments needed for December’s Copenhagen conference on climate change, it is easy to overlook the role of other nations’ development projects on the environment and the need for strengthened environmental institutions and enforcement at regional and national levels.
The tendency to see climate change in isolation from other development, environmental, and human rights priorities threatens to undermine the growing recognition that climate change threatens both developed and developing countries and that Copenhagen must produce meaningful global action rather than platitudes and wishful thinking. This makes it essential that climate change plans be integrated with on-going development plans and that such plans, in turn, take into account their potential climate change impacts.
