Although Bali will not produce a signed treaty for the coming decades, many eyes are on the ÔroadmapÕ to come out of the discussions of the Ad-Hoc Working Group of the Kyoto Protocol.

The multitudinous United Nations Conference on Climate Change underway since December 3 on the tropical Indonesian island of Bali has oscillated between optimism and quiet reserve.
The 12-day event is a thermometer of the success or failure of a strategic anti-global warming treaty that should emerge in two years. But the forecast is confidential, reported Ipsnews.net.
The four issues at the core of the talks are the mitigation of climate change, adaptation to the changes caused by rising temperatures, technology transfer from the rich countries to poor, and incentives to fight against deforestation.
But other problems, which are not on the main agenda, are simmering on the sidelines of the Bali meet, and many of the planet’s inhabitants are suffering those problems firsthand.
There are 25 million “climate refugees“ in the world who are not recognized by an international law that only protects those who are fleeing war or political, religious or ethnic persecution, according to Bodil Ceballos, parliamentarian from Sweden’s Green Party.
“In denying for so long that climate change exists, the world has not wanted to see the consequences either. In Sweden there is talk that eventually we will have climate refugees from Europe’s Mediterranean countries if we don’t stop using fossil fuels soon,“ she said in an interview for this article.
The thrashing that the Sidr cyclone gave Bangladesh on November 15 left more than 4,000 people dead and more than seven million homeless, many of whom are now facing a food crisis.
This is a fate that could befall the inhabitants of many places, such as islands and coastal lowlands, which are the most vulnerable to rising sea levels.
The climate conference host Bali is one of the 17,000 islands that make up the world’s largest archipelago, and is a popular tourist destination because of its impressive chain of volcanoes and the uniqueness of its culture. But Indonesia, the fourth most populous country, with more than 220 million people, is exposed to serious threats.
The rate of the rising sea level, of about two millimeters per year, will accelerate to five millimeters per year in this century. A change of that magnitude will mean significant losses for the 80,000 kilometers of Indonesian coastline as well as for its coral reefs, fisheries and mangroves, says a study published December 4 by the international environmental group WWF.
Furthermore, 60 percent of Indonesia’s population lives in coastal zones and in cities located in low-lying terrain, like Jakarta and Surabaya.
The natural beauty of Bali helps reinforce the optimistic tone accompanying the new government in Australia as it finally ratified the Kyoto Protocol, leaving the United States alone in its rejection of the international treaty that requires industrialized countries to reduce emissions of greenhouse-effect gases.
The George W. Bush government was left even more isolated when a US Senate committee voted in favour of a bill to establish obligatory limits on emissions of greenhouse gases.
Thousands of government delegates from more than 180 countries, as well as experts and activists, are participating in the 13th Conference of Parties (COP13) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and in the third meeting of parties to the Kyoto Protocol.
But the governmental negotiations are taking place behind closed doors with the goal of establishing an agenda for achieving in 2009 an obligatory agreement for curbing greenhouse gases beyond 2012, when the Protocol signed in the Japanese city of Kyoto in 1997 expires.
It was many years before enough countries had ratified the Protocol to make it take effect, in 2005. Meanwhile, the effects of warming temperatures began to multiply. That is why it is essential that progress is made at this meeting towards a new framework to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, said Mike Shanahan, of the International Institute for Environment and Development, in a press statement in Bali.
The industrialized nations that are party to Kyoto are required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2012 to an average of five percent below 1990 levels. The debate under way now follows two paths: how to reach an agreement that includes the United States, which is responsible for more than 20 percent of emissions, and what kind of obligations should be taken on by the big developing countries China, India and Brazil.
Although Bali will not produce a signed treaty for the coming decades, many eyes are on the “road map“ to come out of the discussions of the Ad-Hoc Working Group (AWG) of the Kyoto Protocol, entrusted, among other things, with establishing a range of emissions reductions that the wealthy nations must adopt.
Environmental organizations hope the AWG will uphold an informal decision adopted earlier this year in Vienna: by 2020 the industrialized countries should reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels.

The jump in the consumer price index (CPI) by 6.9 percent year on year in November, the highest level in more than a decade, justifies Chinese leaders’ recent decision to make curbing inflation a top priority next year.
However, to achieve that goal, it is high time to come up with clear-cut policies that respond to the different causes of price increases, reported Chinaview.cn.
Currently, soaring food prices remain the prime driving force of consumer price inflation. Latest statistics show that food prices ballooned 18.2 percent in November from a year earlier, compared with 17.6 percent in October. Because food accounts for one-third of China’s CPI, food price hikes alone pushed up the November CPI figure by almost 6 percentage points.
The prices of certain staple food items have shot up very rapidly. For instance, the price of cooking oil and pork soared 35 percent and 56 percent respectively year on year last month.
It is certainly an urgent task to increase the supply of such food items to stabilize the market. The government has indeed adopted a lot of measures to encourage farmers to produce more.
But in the fight against climbing inflation, it is unwise to believe that the acceleration of overall price gains in the country will be temporary simply because food price inflation used to be cyclical and might prove so this time.
Actually, the rising CPI figures in recent months have been running contrary to earlier predictions that it would steadily fall. Now, there are already new signs that inflation might have found other ways to creep in.
Surging crude oil prices pushed up China’s producer price index by 4.6 percent year-on-year in November, the largest one-month increase in more than two years. Higher prices at the producer level could add pressure to the country’s rising consumer prices.
As the consumer price index increase reached 4.6 percent for the first 11 months, far overshooting the official target of 3 percent for the year as well as the one-year saving interest rate of 3.87 percent, policymakers should prepare to strike at the root of inflation with comprehensive policy responses.
A tight monetary policy is key to the country’s efforts to rein in accelerated inflation. The monetary authorities have been actively mopping up excessive liquidity in the market by raising banks’ reserve ratio to the highest level in more than two decades.

Investors sent Boeing shares down nearly $4, closing at $88.70 per share on the New York Stock Exchange, December 11 .

Pat Shanahan, Boeing’s man on the hot seat, on December 11 offered customers and Wall Street the makings of a credible plan to keep the troubled 787 Dreamliner on track to meet its revised schedule.
But as reported by Businessweek.com, investors will have to fly on the faith of Shanahan’s commendable record of fixing some of Boeing’s most intractable problem programs.
While offering insight into how he is making operational changes since the program schedule was reset in October, Shanahan, vice-president and general manager of the 787 program, and Boeing Commercial Airplane CEO Scott Carson offered few new details on the issues that matter the most to the 787’s fate: namely, how to get from zero to six airplanes a month by 2009 and how exactly to prod some struggling suppliers such as Vought Aircraft to step up to the daunting challenge.
Other key questions relate to weight reduction, aircraft certification, and suppliers being able to adapt quickly to engineering changes.

Delays & Shortages
Shanahan did offer some clear visibility on the first aircraft, which he said is on track to achieve “power-on“ by the end of January. The Honeywell (HON) flight-control software, which had posed an enormous challenge earlier, is now under control, he said.
Flight-control tests will occur after power-on and the first flight is scheduled for the January-February time frame. “My near-term focus is toward power-on and flight, working with partners and ensuring resources are in place to get assembly going,“ Shanahan said in a conference call with reporters and analysts.
He said the amount of uncompleted work traveling from supplier to final assembly in Everett, Wash., was a big eye-opener.
He also blamed much of the delays on the parts and fastener shortage and the lack of a logical process to handle and resolve the problem.

Solid Schedule?
All eyes, though, are focused on the midterm production goals. There, the ramp-up risks and lack of a clear path to delivering 109 airplanes in 24 months continue to hang over the cutting-edge aircraft program.
That explains in large part why investors sent Boeing shares down nearly $4, closing at $88.70 per share December 11 on the New York Stock Exchange.
In October, Boeing delayed its first flight of the fuel-sipping carbon-fiber passenger jet by more than three months, to the end of the first quarter. It pushed back the delivery to launch customer All Nippon Airways by six months, to the end of 2008. Several analysts have called for Boeing to trim what they say is an overly aggressive production schedule until they work out some more of the supply-chain kinks.
But Shanahan said at one point “the schedule is the schedule.“ For some analysts that comment was hardly reassuring. Nadol cited that remark, along with a lack of specific future milestones beyond power-on, to suggest that Boeing execs may have “a lack of full confidence in the schedule.“

Getting Suppliers Ready
Teal Group aerospace analyst Richard Aboulafia agrees. “There was an expectation that they would address that 109 number, and they really didn’t,“ he said. “Achieving the production ramp-up is still highly uncertain.“
In a note to investors, Lehman Brothers (LEH) analyst Joseph Campbell wrote that there was not enough incremental good news to suggest that Boeing can achieve its revised and still “challenging“ program schedule.

Challenges facing India’s financial sector, in particular the task of extending reform to institutions other than commercial banks, are addressed in the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) report on trend and progress of banking.
According to Hindu.com, financial sector reform initiated in early 1990s has had a profound impact on commercial banks, systemically the most important segment. The task is to extend the benefits of reform to other institutions--urban cooperative banks, regional rural banks, and rural cooperatives.
For all the financial intermediaries, especially the banks, the biggest challenge is to raise enough resources to support the strong economic growth.
Policy measures to orient the urban-centric banks towards rural and semi-urban areas have not been wholly successful. However, some banks have turned rural banking profitable by employing better technology and innovative delivery channels.
The RBI will play a catalytic role in enhancing cooperation between the States and the banking system. A perennial shortcoming of commercial banks has been their inability to increase the flow of credit to small scale industries and agriculture.
With a view to sharply delineating the scope and focusing on the priority sector, the RBI has laid down that, from now on, only highly employment intensive sectors such as agriculture and small scale industries will qualify for priority sector advances.
For the banks, ensuring adequacy of capital has become a challenging task also because of the forthcoming move towards Basel II regulatory norms. The entire banking industry is feeling the pressure of reduced interest margins. This underlines the need to prune down operating costs and identify non-interest sources of income.
Even as the financial services industry becomes increasingly global, competition is intensifying, with the distinction between banks and non-banks getting blurred. These trends and wider application of information technology have led to product innovations, some of which are extremely complex.
The ongoing sub-prime crisis in the US suggests that the risks in the financially engineered products have not been fully grasped. For the RBI, devising appropriate risk containment measures in India for these products of globalization has also become an urgent task.