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How can we fight global warming locally?
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How can we fight global warming locally?
The fight against global warming involves us all, from multinational organisations and national governments to local communities and private individuals. It is a collective challenge in which every one of us has a role.
Global warming is an established fact, and it is now widely accepted that increasing levels of greenhouse gases due to human activity are a major contributory factor.
Climate change poses serious potential problems to the global community; rising sea levels, droughts, flooding and cyclones can undermine the economies of nations through loss of land, livestock and property, crop failure and the displacement of people, while wider-ranging disease vectors increase the threat to global health.
The global challenge
An indispensable part of fighting climate change is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. To that end, 175 countries have signed the Kyoto Protocol with binding reduction commitments for industrialised countries for 2008-2012.
However, this is just the beginning. World leaders are in the process of seeking solutions beyond 2012, aiming at a new climate agreement, hopefully to be adopted at the
UN Climate Change Conference, COP15, in Copenhagen in 2009
.
The local challenge
Ambitious and far-sighted government policies and programmes have made Denmark a model country in promoting energy efficiency and sustainable development. But there is still much that individual Danes can do locally to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
More than half of Danish CO2 emissions come from private consumption of heat, electricity, transport and goods. Danes are generally knowledgeable when it comes to energy saving measures, but not all Danes put this knowledge into daily practise. So the Danish Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Transport and Energy have launched a campaign to heighten awareness of energy efficiency. Today the campaign belongs under the recently established Ministry for Climate and Energy. The campaign’s website gives useful advice to Danes on how they can adjust their daily routines to save energy. The aim is to make energy efficiency more attractive to everyone, to reduce domestic CO2 emissions, and make climate change a lively topic of conversation.
Taking responsibility
Global warming concerns us all, and each of us has a personal responsibility to fight it. For some, saving energy is about saving money, while for others it means living up to a social norm or a certain way of living. Whatever the motivation, local efforts by individuals to use energy more efficiently and thereby reduce greenhouse gas emissions will benefit the global environment and the well-being of future generations.
Related Case: How Danes fight global warming
In Denmark the total emission of CO2 calculated on a per capita basis is currently 10 tonnes per year, of which an average of 6 tonnes can be ascribed to personal consumption of heat, electricity, transport and consumer goods.
Case: How Danes fight global warming
Video: Environment and Energy
Malene Freudendal-Pedersen's blog on sustainability
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