Two new reports highlight the unavoidable emergency of climate change and the key responsibility of governments in taking radical measures to address it.
A European Union study on the problems of global climate change, leaked to the press four days before its official launch on 14 March 2008, contained the sobering assessment that a failure to take radical action now to address global warming would create the likelihood of severe conflict over resources in the decades ahead. Two days later, on 16 March, data from the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) reveals that the rate of shrinking of glaciers across the world - a key marker of climate change - has accelerated; this more than doubled between 2006 and 2007, and the 2007 figure was five times the average for the 1980-99 period. These two documents, taken together, present governments and citizens in the leading emissions-producing countries in particular with an unavoidable test.
UNEP's data - included in its report Meltdown in the Mountains, based on research conducted by the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) - is significant for two quite different reasons.
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