[vinnomot] CLIMATE CHANGE: A pyrrhic victory in Bali

SAN-Feature Service

SOUTH ASIAN NEWS-FEATURE SERVICE

December 23,2007

 

CLIMATE CHANGE: A pyrrhic victory in Bali

Sudhir Chella Rajan

 

More than 130 million people live along the vulnerable coastal zone in South Asia, including in mega-cities such as Dhaka, Kolkata, and Mumbai, where infrastructure damage from sea-level rise alone is expected to run into hundreds of billions of dollars.

 

SAN-Feature Service : Human-induced climate change is one of the most profound challenges of the 21st century. The scientific consensus is that business-as-usual growth in greenhouse gas emissions will more than triple their atmospheric concentrations above pre-industrial levels, with devastating consequences for many of the world's ecosystems.

 

Moreover, because of the various positive feedbacks in the earth's geophysical systems, we may have just a narrow window of opportunity to minimise the risk of triggering catastrophic climate change. There is growing evidence that 'runaway warming' is imminent, based on observations of increases in global average and extremes of air and ocean temperatures, rising sea levels, changes in wind patterns, and widespread melting of snow and ice. In the course of just a few decades, scientists expect tens of millions of people to relocate as a result of drought induced by climate change; later on in this century sea-level rise will generate even larger numbers of "climate exiles."

 

Developing countries will face the brunt of these consequences and India is no exception, with close to 700 million people living in rural areas and directly dependent on climate-sensitive sectors such as agriculture, forests and fisheries for their livelihood.

 

Ecosystems such as river-sheds, mangroves, coastal zones, forests, and grasslands are already over-burdened with environmental pressures from commercialisation, excessive resource use and the indiscriminate dumping of industrial and agricultural waste. There is widespread apprehension that we will have problems relating to water availability, substantial reductions in crop yields, increases in disease, flooding in some areas and drought in others, and potentially serious disruptions of the entire monsoon cycle.

 

More than 130 million people live along the vulnerable coastal zone in South Asia, including in mega-cities such as Dhaka, Kolkata, and Mumbai, where infrastructure damage from sea-level rise alone is expected to run into hundreds of billions of dollars.

 

This is the overall context in which the thirteenth meeting of the Conference of Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change took place in Bali. But it failed, as a result of international wrangling, to craft a new framework before the expiry of the Kyoto Protocol in 2012.

 

While much of the blame can be ascribed to the Bush administration for its perennial foot-dragging on climate change mitigation, others have not been entirely innocent. In fact, contrary to the opinion of Al Gore and others, the United States' position is unlikely to change much even if a Democrat is elected President in 2008; the pressure from certain business quarters to remain steadfast and not agree to emission limits will probably remain no matter which party comes to power.

 

European leaders in Bali seemed more interested in merely getting the U.S. "on board" than on building global consensus about limiting greenhouse gas concentrations. India's own contribution to the impasse came in the form of an insistence that rich countries provide more clean technology and finance, as if those were the key missing ingredients to action on climate change.

 

Some countries wanted to establish commitments to reduce industrialised nations' average emissions by up to 40 per cent by 2020, but American opposition to any mandatory limits finally ruled the day. The meeting was declared a victory simply because the U.S. agreed to show up for discussions leading up to a meeting in 2009.

 

This outcome was forged in the final hours of a two-week extravaganza for which several thousand additional tonnes of greenhouse gases came to be emitted, thanks to the presence of international delegates and their groupies at the exotic tropical location. It was left to the weakest countries of the world, the small island nations and countries in sub-Saharan Africa — those most at risk from sea-level rise and droughts associated with climate change — to cry themselves hoarse to get the rest of the world to pay serious attention to the crisis. Indeed, getting the U.S. to "relent" on the road map required the bald statement of the delegate from Papua New Guinea that the U.S. either demonstrate true leadership or get out of the way.

 

India itself could have shown leadership by insisting on an equitable framework with clear emissions reduction targets. Indeed, just a few months ago, at the G8 summit, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh broached the idea of having equal per capita targets, which would imply that industrialised nations cut their per capita emissions at the same time that developing nations increase theirs until they converge around a global endpoint consistent with meeting climate goals. By the time of Bali, however, the Indian delegation was either confused or caught up in the demands of its own industrial lobbies which are benefiting from the flow of funds channelled through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

 

CDM is a trading arrangement within the Kyoto Protocol based on the idea that emission reductions could occur in developing countries in lieu of similar reductions in the industrialised world that would be more expensive. It was originally intended to 'jump start' advanced low-carbon technologies in the developing world, while providing industrialised countries some breathing room to reduce their own emissions. For instance, if a promoter set up a wind farm instead of a coal-fired power plant in Namibia he or she could generate "carbon credits" that could be sold to, say, Germany to offset its emissions reduction target under Kyoto. Namibia would thus have access to a "new" technology that it might not otherwise have opted for and Germany could continue to use an existing coal-fired power plant for a few more years instead of having to decommission it to meet Kyoto targets.

 

CDM has, however, become a cash cow for project developers because it provides a convenient market distortion in the form of a subsidy for projects that have little or no need for it. For instance, the vast majority of credits generated from CDM in India and China (both leaders in CDM projects) are for the decomposition of trifluoromethane (HFC 23), a technology that is cheaply and readily available. The rest are also for technologies that would (or should) be expected to be in the pipeline in any case for other efficiency and environmental reasons, such as wind farms, cogeneration in sugar and pulp industries, methane recovery from municipal landfills, and so on.

 

Many already have co-benefits and are typically commercially viable propositions on their own merit. CDM further creates perverse incentives to developing countries to limit the normal advancement of their own low-carbon technologies, while maintaining carbon-intensive and locally damaging ones in their baselines. In fact, today's CDM technologies used to be promoted by the government for over two decades for reducing energy use and air pollution.

 

It is therefore disingenuous to call them "advanced" technologies but it also explains why Bali was filled to the brim with industry lobbyists. In the end, they were pleased with what they got as a result of India's insistence that wealthy countries make even stronger commitments to provide technology assistance to the developing world, in effect an argument for expanding the scope and scale of the CDM.

 

CDM was designed a decade ago, when it seemed that modest reductions in emissions would be sufficient to get the ball rolling. Since then, however, the scientific community has been profoundly startled by evidence that it is the climate system itself that seems to be on an unstoppable roll. There is increasing consensus that we need to limit concentrations of CO2 to 400 ppm or below (compared with 280 ppm in the pre-industrial era and 380 ppm today). We cannot reach these goals through technology alone, which is the focus of CDM; instead there need to be profound changes in the wasteful lifestyles of the rich wherever they may live, in industrialised or developing nations.

 

A recent report from the UK Hadley Centre shows that in order to restrict average global temperature rise to within 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — a Lakshman rekha of sorts — global greenhouse gas emissions should be near zero by 2060. In this context, all countries, including India, must recognise the need for setting serious and timely targets that are tied to the principle of fair burden sharing.

 

Indeed, Paula Dobriansky, the U.S. negotiator, actually got it right when she insisted that any new agreement ought to involve all the world's major economies, a position that India self-righteously resisted.

 

What is needed, though, is clearly not the U.S. approach that eschews limits and deadlines, but one that keeps them strict on the basis of both scientific evidence and moral need, through equal per capita shares or some similar framework. India needs to focus beyond the immediate goal of filling its begging bowl with CDM money and concentrate on developing fair national and international institutions that address climate change.—SAN-Feature Service

 

The writer is Professor, Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras, and co-author, The Suicidal Planet: How to Prevent Global Climate Catastrophe. E-mail: scrajan@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

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