Climate Change guide
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| Cyclone Sidr © IRIN News |
Vast resources conjured from national treasuries to rescue the discredited banking sector are out of all proportion to those so far committed to protect civilisation from the threat of climate change. Stuttering progress towards vital international agreements defies the reality that global warming will impact poorer countries harder and sooner than the richer countries which are responsible. This moral predicament demands a rapid transition to low carbon economics together with international resource transfer on an unprecedented scale.
Poverty and Climate Change
Climate change campaigners and international development agencies have been slow to grasp their common interests. It is clear that strategies to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are being stabbed in the back by climate change. The UN Human Development Report for 2007/08 (HDR 2007) is unequivocal in concluding that stabilisation of greenhouse gas emissions is an "essential part of the overall fight against poverty and for the MDGs". The World Bank estimates that up to 40% of aid projects could fail through unanticipated climate risk.
The 2007 4th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), confirms that freshwater availability and crop yields, the building blocks of human development, are particularly sensitive to global warming. Africa is not only the most vulnerable region but is also the one continent for which IPCC offers quantified predictions as early as 2020. It says that between 75 and 250 million people in Africa may experience water stress within that period, whilst crop yields in some countries could be reduced by 50%. In Asia, glacier retreat in the Himalayas may lead to water shortages for about 1/6th of the world's population by 2050.
Aid agencies increasingly present evidence that global warming is already happening, demonstrating how the poor are most vulnerable to small changes. An Oxfam briefing states that “hundreds of millions of people are already suffering damage from a rapidly changing climate, which is frustrating their efforts to escape poverty.”
Climate Justice
Research by the UK-based International Institute for Environment and Development shows that the 100 countries most vulnerable to global warming change together account for just 3.2% of global carbon dioxide emissions. A worrying trait of international negotiations has been their tendency to make proposals which compound rather than relieve the injustice inherent in climate change.
For example, the acceptance by governments and some campaigning agencies of a tolerance threshold for global warming of two degrees above pre-industrial levels lacks any grounding in equity. The IPCC 2007 report shows how the richer countries may be relatively unscathed up to this threshold - indeed crop production in temperate zones will increase - whilst crops in tropical regions are already at their limit of temperature sensitivity. Many small island states will not survive warming on this scale.
The Summary for Policymakers in the IPCC report makes no reference to a “safe” limit to global warming; indeed scientists dissociate themselves from the concept. The two degree threshold is a pragmatic construct for the convenience of negotiators.
The impression that the richer countries are focused on protecting themselves, as they were in the 2008 economic collapse, has provoked calls that climate change should be addressed in human rights terms. The deaths, displacement, malnutrition and disease increasingly attributed to global warming represent an infringement of social and economic rights.
In January 2009 the UN Human Rights Council commissioned a report which concluded that “addressing that harm (of global warming) remains a critical human rights concern and obligation under international law.” A rights-based approach would focus on protecting essential food and water supplies, creating leverage for the world’s poorest people to join in the fight against climate change.
Beyond the Kyoto Protocol
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the international treaty agreed at the Rio de Janeiro "Earth Summit" in 1992. It established the vital principle that “the developed country Parties should take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof.” These countries are known as Annex 1 countries and it is they who are subject to legally binding targets under The Kyoto Protocol which was negotiated in 1997 as a supplement to the UNFCC and eventually ratified in February 2005.
In aggregate these targets seek a 5% reduction in the 1990 level of greenhouse gas emissions by 2012. However, the calculation excludes emissions from aviation and shipping and there has been no contribution from the US which refused to ratify the Protocol.
Until the economic recession of 2008/09, global emissions have therefore been rising sharply, defying the scientists who plead that the level must peak and start to fall before 2020. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now at its highest for at least 800,000 years.
In seeking to limit global warming to two degrees, negotiations for a post-2012 regime are loosely based on an IPCC stabilisation scenario which cuts the 1990 baseline of emissions by 50% by 2050, with the concentration of CO2- equivalent gases (which takes into account all anthropogenic emissions including those of negative warming effect) peaking at 450 parts per million. The current level is about 380ppm, very similar to the concentration of CO2 alone, and therefore the source of some confusion.
Although G8 leaders agreed in 2009 to “reducing emissions of greenhouse gases in aggregate by 80% or more by 2050”, the global target demands that developing countries share the burden by lowering their rising trajectories. This is one of the stumbling blocks: an approach based on equity would concede that poorer countries should be allowed to develop without restriction, just as the richer countries have done.
Agreement is therefore unlikely to be reached unless the Annex 1 countries make medium term commitments of emissions reductions of the order of 25%-40% by 2020. Although the Obama administration is now a willing participant in the process, the American Clean Energy and Security Act has been watered down by the House of Representatives and is struggling to gain acceptance in the Senate. Advance billing of the Copenhagen conference in December 2009 as the final deadline may have created expectations which are unrealistic.
Adaptation
Practical measures which anticipate or react to the impact of climate change are described as "adaptation”. There are limits to adaptation; it can succeed only alongside effective mitigation which contains climate change within the boundaries of adaptive capacity.
Unfortunately, adaptive capacity is a measure which exposes global inequality at its most extreme. In adapting to the digital revolution of recent decades, the highly educated, healthy and skilled workforces in industrialised countries have an impressive track record. And these countries are already committing to defensive projects in anticipation of more extreme hurricanes, floods and rising sea levels. Price tags of hundreds of millions of dollars are no disincentive.
By contrast, about one sixth of the world’s population is absorbed in the daily scramble for household essentials, in countries which lack resources to provide basic health and education. To inject an urgent need for drought-resistant crop varieties, or soil, forest and water conservation measures into such environments is a formidable task. Yet the greatest and most immediate need for adaptation will centre on these poorest countries.
The answer is to approach adaptation and development as two sides of the same coin. Successful poverty reduction programmes will reduce vulnerability to change. In priority to major infrastructure projects, adaptation should first downsize to build on existing community experience in reacting to a variable climate.
However, presenting climate change as an additional pressure on the existing causes of poverty creates immense difficulty in separating out the costs of adaptation from the costs of existing development goals. The HDR 2007 priced adaptation in developing countries at $86 billion pa, almost as much as the entire current global aid budget. The more recent World Development Report 2010 acknowledges the difficulty in the calculations but reaches a similar conclusion.
Disaster Risk and Migration
Disaster risk management is a component of adaptation, especially in the context of extreme weather events. For example, the shelters and early warning systems constructed in the deltas of Bangladesh have already proved their worth in saving lives.
Although it is difficult to establish a direct causal link between natural disasters and climate change, the increase in frequency of the most serious events – doubling over the last two decades - is consistent with scientific predictions. A report published by the Global Humanitarian Forum in 2009 suggests that 99% of the casualties occur in developing countries.
The most extreme form of climate disaster renders land unfit for human habitation, forcing people to migrate. This can occur for example through desertification, inundation or salinisation and is a failure of mitigation rather than adaptation. The governments of the island states of Maldives and Tuvalu are already contemplating the mass migration of their populations to new countries.
Predictions of cross-border climate-induced migration are speculative but suggest a total of 200-250 million by 2050. The UN Refugee Agency acknowledges that some degree of new international protection should be provided, but is uncomfortable with the terminology of “climate refugees” out of concern for destabilising the long-established rights of political refugees.
Deforestation and Climate Change
The successor to the Kyoto Protocol is very likely to include action to reduce deforestation, responding to greater scientific clarity that the loss of tropical forests contributes up to 20% of all greenhouse gas emissions. The Bali climate change conference of 2007 encouraged research on how developing countries might be compensated for the economic losses incurred in “Reducing Deforestation and Degradation” (REDD).
It is broadly accepted that REDD could be one of the most efficient and cost effective ways of tackling climate change, whilst simultaneously delivering the many other valuable benefits of protecting tropical forests. The current aspiration is to reduce global deforestation by 25% by 2015 at an aggregate cost of around $25 billion. Negotiations have focused on the very considerable logistical difficulties of measurement and verification and, in the absence of the necessary funding commitments, the outcome is uncertain.
Technology Transfer
Apart from the soft touch of the Kyoto targets, there is concern about the methods, known as "flexibility mechanisms", by which the rich countries are permitted to cover any shortfall in their emissions reductions. In particular the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) encourages Annex 1 countries to install modern climate-friendly technology in developing countries in return for UN-certified carbon credits towards their own mitigation targets.
In theory poorer countries can then leapfrog dirty and inefficient power technology in their energy evolution. But the CDM offers technology transfer as sufficient in itself, with no underlying reference to the real energy needs of developing countries. These needs are increasingly desperate with 1.6 billion people lacking an electricity supply, mostly in Africa and South Asia. But over 70% of the value of all CDM projects has been awarded to China where universal electricity coverage has already been achieved. By September 2009, Africa had qualified for only 34 out of over 1800 approved projects. UN negotiators have requested a review of how the CDM could be more effective, both in scale and in targeting.
Financial Transfer
Developing countries will not sign up to global mitigation targets without satisfaction on the financial package. Both China and India have demanded that wealthy countries provide additional resources of 0.5%-1% of GDP to developing countries, equating to $200-$400 billion pa.
The financial architecture to integrate developing countries into the fight against climate change is a shambles. There is little consensus on the costs of mitigation, adaptation or REDD. Arguments continue over the relative merits of “cap and trade” schemes, carbon taxes, “voluntary” bilateral aid and the role of carbon offsets. There are squabbles over the governance of fund distribution.
The consequence is a kaleidoscope of about twenty multilateral and bilateral climate funding initiatives. Poor countries have no choice but to grapple with the bureaucracy and to assert appropriate national ownership of climate strategies.
Climate campaigners suggest that a moral foundation would deliver a more rational approach to funding. For mitigation, the concept of ecological debt observes that industrialised countries have consumed more than their fair share of the earth’s capacity for safe burning of fossil fuels. They owe an emissions debt to the developing world.
Adaptation goes one step further by invoking the language of legal compensation. For example, African negotiators preparing for Copenhagen have issued a declaration that “Africa is seeking reparations from developed countries.”
Such notions do not feature in donor country plans and the amounts of funding so far offered are hopelessly inadequate in relation to the need. Furthermore, there are concerns about diversion of conventional aid budgets. The World Bank’s World Development Report 2010 suggests that total climate funding available for developing countries in the period 2008-2012 is about $10 billion pa. The flagship UN Adaptation Fund is to be financed by a 2% levy on the CDM and will generate just $300 million pa during this period. To put these figures into perspective, the US government has so far found more than $150 billion to rescue a single financial institution (AIG) since the banking collapse in 2008.
China and India
China and India present the great dilemma for post-2012 negotiations. Should they be classified as developing or industrialised countries? Both are host to hundreds of millions of desperately poor people yet India's industrial tycoons make takeover bids for major European companies whilst China’s carbon dioxide emissions now exceed those of the US. The issues are complex, not least that China's dominance of manufactured goods is such that about a third of its carbon emissions is effectively outsourced from the consumer countries.
Both countries acknowledge the serious threat of climate change and have started to put in place institutional structures to address the issue. China aims to improve its energy efficiency by 20% between 2006 and 2010. However, Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, has said that social development is the first priority and that "the developing world cannot accept a freeze on global inequity".
India's per capita carbon dioxide emissions are 1.5 tonnes per annum against 20 tonnes in the US. There seems little prospect of either India or China being drawn into a post-Kyoto agreement which involves targets for carbon dioxide emissions, unless the Annex 1 countries make commitments on a quite different scale from those to date.
Carbon Citizenship
If the driving force behind apocalyptic Indo-Chinese emissions scenarios is aspiration to western lifestyles, then the surest solution is to modify them. Climate change is not the root problem; it is just one of several critical environmental symptoms attributable to unsustainable lifestyles.
The inspiration for behaviour change in richer countries necessary to meet our Chinese and Indian counterparts halfway remains elusive. One potential vision is of a lifestyle which consumes no more than a fair and equal share of the earth's capacity to absorb greenhouse gases. Allowing for continued growth of the world’s population, estimates suggest that a maximum annual personal carbon allowance of less than two tonnes of carbon dioxide would stabilise the climate.
In directly addressing the current injustice of climate change, carbon citizenship could overturn our darkest fears about climate breakdown, replacing the threat of violent resource conflicts with the promise of bridging the artificial boundaries of the political world.
Climate change campaigners and international development agencies have been slow to grasp their common interests. It is clear that strategies to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are being stabbed in the back by climate change. The UN Human Development Report for 2007/08 (HDR 2007) is unequivocal in concluding that stabilisation of greenhouse gas emissions is an "essential part of the overall fight against poverty and for the MDGs". The World Bank estimates that up to 40% of aid projects could fail through unanticipated climate risk.
|
| Dr. Rajendra Pachauri © IPCC |
Aid agencies increasingly present evidence that global warming is already happening, demonstrating how the poor are most vulnerable to small changes. An Oxfam briefing states that “hundreds of millions of people are already suffering damage from a rapidly changing climate, which is frustrating their efforts to escape poverty.”
Climate Justice
Research by the UK-based International Institute for Environment and Development shows that the 100 countries most vulnerable to global warming change together account for just 3.2% of global carbon dioxide emissions. A worrying trait of international negotiations has been their tendency to make proposals which compound rather than relieve the injustice inherent in climate change.
|
| Eritrean farmers in Tsorona, Debub © IRIN News |
The Summary for Policymakers in the IPCC report makes no reference to a “safe” limit to global warming; indeed scientists dissociate themselves from the concept. The two degree threshold is a pragmatic construct for the convenience of negotiators.
The impression that the richer countries are focused on protecting themselves, as they were in the 2008 economic collapse, has provoked calls that climate change should be addressed in human rights terms. The deaths, displacement, malnutrition and disease increasingly attributed to global warming represent an infringement of social and economic rights.
In January 2009 the UN Human Rights Council commissioned a report which concluded that “addressing that harm (of global warming) remains a critical human rights concern and obligation under international law.” A rights-based approach would focus on protecting essential food and water supplies, creating leverage for the world’s poorest people to join in the fight against climate change.
Beyond the Kyoto Protocol
|
| Yvo de Boer © UNFCCC |
In aggregate these targets seek a 5% reduction in the 1990 level of greenhouse gas emissions by 2012. However, the calculation excludes emissions from aviation and shipping and there has been no contribution from the US which refused to ratify the Protocol.
Until the economic recession of 2008/09, global emissions have therefore been rising sharply, defying the scientists who plead that the level must peak and start to fall before 2020. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now at its highest for at least 800,000 years.
In seeking to limit global warming to two degrees, negotiations for a post-2012 regime are loosely based on an IPCC stabilisation scenario which cuts the 1990 baseline of emissions by 50% by 2050, with the concentration of CO2- equivalent gases (which takes into account all anthropogenic emissions including those of negative warming effect) peaking at 450 parts per million. The current level is about 380ppm, very similar to the concentration of CO2 alone, and therefore the source of some confusion.
Although G8 leaders agreed in 2009 to “reducing emissions of greenhouse gases in aggregate by 80% or more by 2050”, the global target demands that developing countries share the burden by lowering their rising trajectories. This is one of the stumbling blocks: an approach based on equity would concede that poorer countries should be allowed to develop without restriction, just as the richer countries have done.
Agreement is therefore unlikely to be reached unless the Annex 1 countries make medium term commitments of emissions reductions of the order of 25%-40% by 2020. Although the Obama administration is now a willing participant in the process, the American Clean Energy and Security Act has been watered down by the House of Representatives and is struggling to gain acceptance in the Senate. Advance billing of the Copenhagen conference in December 2009 as the final deadline may have created expectations which are unrealistic.
Adaptation
Practical measures which anticipate or react to the impact of climate change are described as "adaptation”. There are limits to adaptation; it can succeed only alongside effective mitigation which contains climate change within the boundaries of adaptive capacity.
Unfortunately, adaptive capacity is a measure which exposes global inequality at its most extreme. In adapting to the digital revolution of recent decades, the highly educated, healthy and skilled workforces in industrialised countries have an impressive track record. And these countries are already committing to defensive projects in anticipation of more extreme hurricanes, floods and rising sea levels. Price tags of hundreds of millions of dollars are no disincentive.
|
| water intensive cotton in Mali © Oxfam Great Britain |
The answer is to approach adaptation and development as two sides of the same coin. Successful poverty reduction programmes will reduce vulnerability to change. In priority to major infrastructure projects, adaptation should first downsize to build on existing community experience in reacting to a variable climate.
However, presenting climate change as an additional pressure on the existing causes of poverty creates immense difficulty in separating out the costs of adaptation from the costs of existing development goals. The HDR 2007 priced adaptation in developing countries at $86 billion pa, almost as much as the entire current global aid budget. The more recent World Development Report 2010 acknowledges the difficulty in the calculations but reaches a similar conclusion.
Disaster Risk and Migration
Disaster risk management is a component of adaptation, especially in the context of extreme weather events. For example, the shelters and early warning systems constructed in the deltas of Bangladesh have already proved their worth in saving lives.
Although it is difficult to establish a direct causal link between natural disasters and climate change, the increase in frequency of the most serious events – doubling over the last two decades - is consistent with scientific predictions. A report published by the Global Humanitarian Forum in 2009 suggests that 99% of the casualties occur in developing countries.
|
| Addu Atoll. Maldives © Karin Afeef |
Predictions of cross-border climate-induced migration are speculative but suggest a total of 200-250 million by 2050. The UN Refugee Agency acknowledges that some degree of new international protection should be provided, but is uncomfortable with the terminology of “climate refugees” out of concern for destabilising the long-established rights of political refugees.
Deforestation and Climate Change
|
| Primary forest, Brazil, CFU000553 © Roberto Faidutti / FAO |
It is broadly accepted that REDD could be one of the most efficient and cost effective ways of tackling climate change, whilst simultaneously delivering the many other valuable benefits of protecting tropical forests. The current aspiration is to reduce global deforestation by 25% by 2015 at an aggregate cost of around $25 billion. Negotiations have focused on the very considerable logistical difficulties of measurement and verification and, in the absence of the necessary funding commitments, the outcome is uncertain.
Technology Transfer
|
| Solar lantern © Practical Action |
In theory poorer countries can then leapfrog dirty and inefficient power technology in their energy evolution. But the CDM offers technology transfer as sufficient in itself, with no underlying reference to the real energy needs of developing countries. These needs are increasingly desperate with 1.6 billion people lacking an electricity supply, mostly in Africa and South Asia. But over 70% of the value of all CDM projects has been awarded to China where universal electricity coverage has already been achieved. By September 2009, Africa had qualified for only 34 out of over 1800 approved projects. UN negotiators have requested a review of how the CDM could be more effective, both in scale and in targeting.
Financial Transfer
Developing countries will not sign up to global mitigation targets without satisfaction on the financial package. Both China and India have demanded that wealthy countries provide additional resources of 0.5%-1% of GDP to developing countries, equating to $200-$400 billion pa.
The financial architecture to integrate developing countries into the fight against climate change is a shambles. There is little consensus on the costs of mitigation, adaptation or REDD. Arguments continue over the relative merits of “cap and trade” schemes, carbon taxes, “voluntary” bilateral aid and the role of carbon offsets. There are squabbles over the governance of fund distribution.
The consequence is a kaleidoscope of about twenty multilateral and bilateral climate funding initiatives. Poor countries have no choice but to grapple with the bureaucracy and to assert appropriate national ownership of climate strategies.
|
| Glacial lake outburst site, Bhutan © Piet van der Poel |
Adaptation goes one step further by invoking the language of legal compensation. For example, African negotiators preparing for Copenhagen have issued a declaration that “Africa is seeking reparations from developed countries.”
Such notions do not feature in donor country plans and the amounts of funding so far offered are hopelessly inadequate in relation to the need. Furthermore, there are concerns about diversion of conventional aid budgets. The World Bank’s World Development Report 2010 suggests that total climate funding available for developing countries in the period 2008-2012 is about $10 billion pa. The flagship UN Adaptation Fund is to be financed by a 2% levy on the CDM and will generate just $300 million pa during this period. To put these figures into perspective, the US government has so far found more than $150 billion to rescue a single financial institution (AIG) since the banking collapse in 2008.
China and India
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| Tata Nano, the world's cheapest car © bbjee (flickr) |
Both countries acknowledge the serious threat of climate change and have started to put in place institutional structures to address the issue. China aims to improve its energy efficiency by 20% between 2006 and 2010. However, Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, has said that social development is the first priority and that "the developing world cannot accept a freeze on global inequity".
India's per capita carbon dioxide emissions are 1.5 tonnes per annum against 20 tonnes in the US. There seems little prospect of either India or China being drawn into a post-Kyoto agreement which involves targets for carbon dioxide emissions, unless the Annex 1 countries make commitments on a quite different scale from those to date.
Carbon Citizenship
If the driving force behind apocalyptic Indo-Chinese emissions scenarios is aspiration to western lifestyles, then the surest solution is to modify them. Climate change is not the root problem; it is just one of several critical environmental symptoms attributable to unsustainable lifestyles.
|
| Solar panels at health centre, London © Peter Armstrong |
In directly addressing the current injustice of climate change, carbon citizenship could overturn our darkest fears about climate breakdown, replacing the threat of violent resource conflicts with the promise of bridging the artificial boundaries of the political world.
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Many important development issues are missing from our range of Guides. OneWorld wants to fill these gaps as part of our efforts to improve understanding of the issues faced by developing countries. We receive no funding for the production of our educational resources. Every small contribution helps!
Many important development issues are missing from our range of Guides. OneWorld wants to fill these gaps as part of our efforts to improve understanding of the issues faced by developing countries. We receive no funding for the production of our educational resources. Every small contribution helps!
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