'Stop green gobbledygook'

Johannesburg - Business representatives have appealed to government's negotiators to keep them fully informed about climate change and stop referring to the threat in a confusing language.

Representatives attending "Copenhagen Unpacked", a discussion group held on Thursday by Investec in Sandton, said they could not understand the abbreviations used. Use ordinary language, asked a businessman.

A businesswoman said that government should draft a book of rules.

She said businesses needed to understand the requirements they had to comply with. They had to know what was expected of them. They were frustrated. They did not know what the environment would look like in future or what they should prepare for.

Joanne Yawitch, deputy director-general of the Department of Environmental Affairs and government's chief negotiator, responded to these requests saying government undertook to make comprehensive information available to both the civil community and business this year.

Yawitch said government championed businesses' measuring of their gas emissions and reporting on them. At this stage reporting emissions was still voluntary, but it would probably soon become compulsory.

She said that although the Copenhagen summit had been a tragic flop, there was still hope that a legal, binding agreement would be achieved in Mexico at the end of the year.

Stefan Raubenheimer, a senior member of the University of Cambridge's Programme for Sustainable Leadership in South Africa, also said the recent summit in Copenhagen had been a dismal failure.

It was poorly organised and a fiasco - but it was the modern world's first such conference.

- Sake24.com

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