Building on Montreal's small gains
Praful Bidwai
The News International, 17 December 2005
The fact that more than 150 countries agreed at the Montreal climate conference to hold further talks to counter global warming should give us all some hope. This means that the Kyoto Protocol, agreed under the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), is secure—despite irrational opposition from the United States, which accounts for 24 percent of the world's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Under Kyoto, 36 industrialised countries must reduce emissions by 5.2 percent (over 1990 levels) by 2008-2012. At Montreal, they agreed to make deeper cuts in emissions post-2012. China and India, with their gargantuan appetite for energy, agreed to play an active role in future talks, but accepted no targets.
Montreal's message, that the future lies in clean and sustainable technologies, was so powerful that even the US blinked and returned to the conference after walking out. It now says it's willing to join exploratory talks for a non-binding agreement.
While significant, Montreal's gains shouldn't be exaggerated. It took the world's climate scientists and environmentalists a quarter-century to convince it of the significance of climate change. The Kyoto targets are so meagre that it would take 30 such protocols just to stabilise GHG concentrations at twice their level at the time of the Industrial Revolution! The Protocol also exempted developing countries from emission cuts, including large polluters (China, India and Brazil). Major Northern emitters like the US and Australia stayed away from Kyoto.
Drastic GHG cuts are an urgent imperative. Humanity has been living off the globe's natural capital and has wrought enormous environmental changes, including deforestation and disappearance of countless species. The most destructive is the rise in the globe's temperature by almost 1ºC. This has caused a rapid melting of polar icecaps and a rise in sea levels.
This has altered the world's complex climate, including different streams, currents, circulations and rainfall patterns. The effects are already visible through extreme weather events like the 2003 heat wave, which killed 35,000 in Western Europe, last winter's snowfall in Dubai, and a doubling of the ferocity of hurricanes over 30 years. South Asia too has been affected—witness Mumbai's extraordinary 944 mm rainfall on July 18—, and more frequent cyclones in the Bay of Bengal.
The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that in 2005 global warming caused damage equivalent to $200 billion. Indian scientists say that climate change wrought a drop in India's agricultural output in 2002-03 and 2003-04. Wheat yields fell 20-40 percent, and mustard yields by 50-70 percent, in 2002-03.
The World Health Organisation says climate change annually causes at least five million cases of illness and more than 150,000 deaths. Some of the world's poorest countries will suffer a doubling of deaths from malaria, diarrhoeal diseases and malnutrition by 2030.
The grimmest predictions pertain to low-lying countries. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that global temperatures could rise by 1.4 to 5.80C by 2100. This will raise sea levels by a mind-boggling 88 cm. Entire countries like Maldives will disappear. Tragically, the worst-affected will be island-nations on the Pacific and Indian Ocean coastlines and in sub-Saharan Africa—among the world's least polluting and poorest countries. Eventually, two-fifths of the world's population, which lives within 60 km of the coast, will be affected.
Alarming forecasts for South Asia come from an Indo-British scientific study released in September. This predicts a temperature rise of 3 to 40C in India in 30-40 years, causing droughts in the North and Northeast, and floods in the Ganga, Godavari and Krishna basins. (A study of Pakistan is much needed, but the picture is unlikely to be very different.)
The worst long-term threat to the subcontinent comes from the rapid melting of icecaps on the Tibetan plateau and the receding of Himalayan glaciers. The plateau is where seven of Asia's greatest rivers, including the Indus, Ganga, Brahmaputra, Mekong and Yang-tse, originate. The likely effects—floods, followed by long-term droughts—will be devastating for the subcontinent.
All this calls for urgent and radical measures which go far beyond the Kyoto Protocol. Kyoto must be defended against ecologically irresponsible governments like the US's which concocted “scientific” lies to deny global warming and declared it won't compromise on “the American way of life”. But Kyoto is flawed. Besides mandating paltry GHG reductions, it encourages carbon trading—through a system of “credits”, which polluting Northern corporations can buy cheap through “clean development mechanism” projects in the South.
Most such projects are unworthy or inadequate. A Dutch study indicates that CDM projects will at best cut GHG emissions by 0.1 percent—below even the Kyoto target of 5.2 percent!
The world must reduce emissions by 80 percent over 30 years. This is achievable. But it means shifting to non-fossil fuel, renewable and environmentally sound energy technologies; moving away from energy-intensive agriculture; and conserving water. This will demand huge cuts in consumption in the North, but also in fast-growing Southern economies. This Earth can't bear the burden of Western-style consumption.
It's simply dishonest for South Asian countries and China to argue that the North accounts for 75 percent of GHG emissions; their own per capita emissions are below the global average; and hence that they needn't undertake reductions.
The global average is itself too high (4.1 tonnes of CO2 per capita). Some Southern countries are fast approaching it—e.g. China (2.8 tonnes) and India (1.1)—although they are well below the US's criminal level of 20 tonnes.
There are huge consumption disparities in the South between rich and poor. The South Asian elite is increasingly adopting Northern consumption patterns. In terms of lifestyle, it lives on a different planet from a majority of the people. It's unethical for the elite to hide behind the poverty of the people—only to feed its monstrous appetite for SUVs (fuel-guzzling sport-utility vehicles with their truck-level emissions) and airconditioners, to shop in glittering malls, and generate US-level per capita wastes.
This past July, India joined five of the world's biggest polluters—US, China, Japan, South Korea and Australia—in a secret and deplorable pact, which seeks to bypass, indeed undermine, Kyoto while promoting dubious technologies like nuclear power, in the name of CDMs and energy “efficiency”. The agreement sets no quotas for GHG reductions. This is a reprehensible betrayal of India's international responsibility.
All us South Asian citizens must mount pressure on our governments to change growth-models based on high energy consumption. Each time our economies grow by 6 percent, GHG emissions rise by 8 percent. This must stop.
A South Asian country (India) had seized the initiative at the world's first major conference on the environment, at Stockholm in 1972. The subcontinent must now show leadership in stopping and rolling back climate change. It must try to bring “environmental rogues” like the US into the FCCC process. And it must set a positive example by proposing emission-reduction standards for the South with due regard to an equitable sharing of global environmental resources.
Our governments' domestic task is clearly cut out: ban SUVs, steeply raise taxes on airconditioners and other high-energy gadgets, discourage private transport, and vigorously promote renewables. The subcontinent can make a lasting and worthy contribution to the world by promoting these agendas.
Copyright 2005 The News International
|
