by Alex Evans | Dec 5, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, East Asia and Pacific
That’s the question I ask in an article published today on ChinaDialogue, a bilingual English / Chinese environment website.
I’ve already blogged here about a paper that I published a few weeks back, The Post-Kyoto Bidding War, which discussed the need for a global ceiling on CO2 concentrations and for developing country targets in a post-Kyoto regime. The paper noted, approvingly, the evolving German-Indian conversation about the need for a future climate deal to centre on convergence to equal per capita emission rights, and suggested that this could potentially pave the way for a more substantive discussion about stabilising the climate than the one we’ve had to date.
What the paper didn’t explore in detail is the fascinating situation of China – a nation whose CO2 emissions per capita are right on the cusp of the crucial tipping point of global average per capita emissions. I spoke recently to the International Energy Agency to ask them when they expected China’s per capita emissions to surpass the global average. Their answer: 2008. That date is of fundamental importance for all negotiators in Bali, as the ChinaDialogue article explains:
When this change takes place, it will represent a major watershed in international climate policy. China has until now been squarely in the same camp as the G77 bloc of developing countries, but its accession to the above average emitters’ club may introduce a much more nuanced picture.
Whereas for India, participation in a global deal based on per capita convergence makes sense for reasons of profitability alone, the same will from next year not hold true for China. As its per capita emissions overtake the global average, it will find itself in the same situation as both the US and the EU, in that any global deal that actually stabilises the climate will involve real terms emissions reductions – regardless of whether the process of convergence to equal per capita levels happens quickly, slowly or not at all.
In this sense, whether China should support a stabilisation ceiling – and the targets for developing countries that it would inevitably entail – depends entirely on how urgent China perceives climate change to be, and how badly it wants the world to agree a solution to the problem.
If China essentially concurs with the relaxed view about urgency of the United States, then there is no problem. But if, on the other hand, China thinks that climate-driven damages are likely to be sufficiently serious and detrimental to Chinese interests to warrant solving the problem sooner rather than later – by setting a stabilisation target, in other words – then that will necessitate the development of a Chinese view on how the resulting “global emissions budget” should be shared out. Few issues involved in China’s “peaceful rise” are likely to be as significant in their implications for the rest of the world as this one.
What it comes down to, in a nutshell, is this: if China does see climate change as urgent, and genuinely wants to solve it, then does it accept per capita convergence as the core principle for sharing out a global emissions budget? And if not, then how does it think such a budget should be divided between 192 countries?
by Alex Evans | Dec 3, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, East Asia and Pacific
More interesting post-election goings on in Australia. Since April, a Stern-esque Review of climate change has been underway, headed by Professor Ross Garnaut, an economics expert from the Australian National University – and former boss, twenty years ago, of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
While the Review was initially commissioned by Australia’s states and territories, they extended a standing invitation to the national Government to join the Review. Following his landslide election victory and return-of-the-prodigal-son on Kyoto, Rudd has done just that.
Last week, Garnaut delivered a lecture setting out his thinking on international climate policy. He starts by calling for a quantified stabilisation target and a global emissions budget – and then continues:
What sorts of principles might guide the allocation of a global emissions budget across countries? To be widely accepted as being reasonable the principles will need to be simply, transparent and radily applicable. In the end, they will need to give much weight to equal per capita rights of emissions. They will need to allow long periods for adjustment towards such positions – within the over-riding requirements to stay within an environmentally responsible global emissions budget. One possible way of bringing these two elements together would be the “contration and convergence” approach that has been discussed favourably in Germany and India at times in the past.
Now that is interesting. Obviously, I think he’s spot on (his position being exactly the same as the one I called for in my paper on The Post-Kyoto Bidding War, published here a few weeks back). True, Garnaut is (as an op-ed in today’s edition of The Age notes) not the government’s only climate change adviser. But still: who’d have guessed that we’d see the Australians, of all people, flirting with this line of thinking?
by Alex Evans | Nov 28, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security
International Alert have published an excellent new report (funded in part by CIC) entitled A Climate of Conflict: the links between climate change, peace and war. It’s a great example of the kind of integrated approach that needs to become routine for governments and international agencies, marrying areas of work until recently seen as discrete from one another. (Dan Smith, one of the authors of the report and the head of IA, has been doing this kind of integration for ages: he’s the editor of Penguin’s excellent State of the World Atlas.)
The report finds that there are 46 countries – home to 2.7 billion people – in which “the effects of climate change interacting with economic, social and political problems will create a high risk of violent conflict”. Another 56 countries, with 1.2 billion inabitants, have weak institutions of government that are likely to struggle with the additional strain posed by climate change. The lists – best viewed here on a zoomable map – make for interesting reading: the high risk list, for instance, includes not only obvious places like Sudan or Angola, but also countries including India, Peru, Indonesia, the Philippines, Bosnia and Iran.
Intriguingly – and encouragingly, when one thinks about it – the report argues that
…peacebuilding and adaptation are effectively the same kind of activity, involving the same kinds of methods of dialogue and social engagement, requiring from governments the same values of inclusivity and transparency.
The nature of resilience, in other words, looks pretty similar in the face of both climate change and armed conflict, dissimilar though they might appear at first glance:
A society that can develop adaptive strategies for climate change in this way is well equipped to avoid armed conflict. And a society that can manage conflicts and major disagreements over serious issues without a high risk of violence is well equipped to adapt successfully to the challenge of climate change. Climate change could even reconcile otherwise divided communities by posing a threat against which to unite and tasks on which to cooperate.
The report’s recommendations are definitely worth a look.
by David Steven | Nov 21, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity
Yesterday, while railing against UNAIDS for its failure to provide accurate estimates of the number of people with HIV/AIDS, I was casting around for the first person to make the wrong-about-HIV=wrong-about-climate-change link.
I couldn’t find anything then, but our friend Claudi Rosett has now made the link:
Could there possibly be a certain parallel here between past UN alarmism over a wildfire global AIDS pandemic, and Ban Ki-moon’s latest pronouncement that to stop the imminent, irreversible, dire, apocalyptic, overwhelming, total, unquestionable and abruptly looming climate catastrophe (he went and saw a melting glacier for himself — who are we to question what that means?), there must now be a titanic planet-wide wealth transfer, with the UN as fee-collecting broker and middleman?
At the imminent UN climate conference next month by the warm beaches of Bali, where UN staffers will collect their per diems while UN eminences plan ways to chill our economy, will anyone dare to bring that up?
by David Steven | Nov 21, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, East Asia and Pacific
My response to Alex’s post is – why wouldn’t Kevin Rudd take Australia back into Kyoto? The country is already tracking its Kyoto target and is quite capable of meeting it:
The Tracking to the Kyoto Target report projects the levels of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2008-2012. It forecasts Australia’s emissions to be 109 per cent of 1990 levels by 2008-2012.
Australia is committed to achieving an emissions target of 108 percent of 1990 levels by 2008-2012 and the report shows we are within 1 percent of meeting that target.
Rudd, it seems, will bear little political cost if he triumphantly returns his country to the fold. New Zealand, however, is in a a more difficult position. It’s in Kyoto, but will miss it will miss its target by 12% on current projections. According to the New Zealand Institute, a leading think tank:
With the benefit of hindsight, a previous commitment on climate change, in the form of New Zealand’s obligations under the Kyoto Protocol, was negotiated and ratified without a full understanding of the New Zealand position. The official view at the time of New Zealand’s ratification in December 2002 was that New Zealand would receive a significant national benefit.
As it has turned out, however, New Zealand has incurred a financial liability currently estimated to be in excess of $500 million.
The Institute concludes that New Zealand should still aim to meet its Kyoto targets – but by 2020, not 2012.
