by Alex Evans | Feb 2, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia
I did a straw poll this morning of the 70 or so participants at Wilton Park’s European Security in 2020 conference (mainly policymakers from foreign and defence ministries, and researchers at think tanks and universities – drawn from a good 20 or so mainly European countries). The questions asked went like this:
1. If you could assemble a group of world leaders of your choice, and get them to make a global deal on one issue, what would that issue be?
2. Which countries / blocs (min. 2, max. 20) would be needed in order to forge that deal?
3. Which international institution or forum could best host such a negotiation? If none, which is currently closest to what we would need?
4. Which country or region will be Europe’s single most important bilateral relationship in 2020?
5. What will be the three most important subjects of discussion in that relationship?
6. What does that country / region want from us?
7. What will be Europe’s three biggest vulnerabilities in 2020?
8. What are the 3 key steps Europe could take now to reduce those vulnerabilities?
9. If the biggest unexpected shocks of the last 20 years were (for example) the fall of the Iron Curtain or 9/11, what do you imagine might be the biggest in the next 20?
The results were pretty interesting (click here for a pdf with graphs showing all answers to each of these questions).
Participants overwhelmingly saw climate change as the most important issue for a global deal (34% of responses, compared to 13% for the next highest priority). Surprisingly, though, the impacts of climate change did not figure heavily in perceptions of key European vulnerabilities: only 3% of votes cast were for climate impacts, placing the issue outside of the top ten vulnerabilities.
In terms of the countries needed to make the key global deal, the US and China shared joint first place, with 20 votes each out of a total of 131 (participants were allowed to name up to 20 countries or blocs). The EU itself was next, with 19 votes, followed by a fairly tight cluster of India, Russia and Brazil all of which scored more than 10 votes. After these countries, there was a significant drop-off; Japan, the next country to figure on the list, scored only 4 votes.
There was also an overwhelming consensus on the UN as the key forum for negotiating the global deal deemed to be most important: it scored 57% of the votes, though many of those included the caveat “with significant reform”. The G8 was next, with 21%; other forums cited tended to be issue specific, e.g. the NPT or UNFCCC.
Over 50% of participants saw the US remaining firmly in the top spot as Europe’s key bilateral partner in 2020. Interestingly, Russia – rather than China – came second, by a decisive margin: 22% voted for Russia as opposed to only 10% for China, although a further 8% of participants also voted for “Asia” as the key bilateral relationship.
Which issues would matter in the key bilateral relationship? Trade and economic relations came out decisively in front, with 22% of votes – followed by energy (16%), security / defence (13%), resource security (11%), climate change (8%) and crisis management / peacekeeping (7%).
By and large, perceptions of what Europe’s key partner would want from the EU were as could be expected: trade and market access and “a trusted partner” were the two most popular answers. Participants who cited Russia as Europe’s key partner tended to cite a desire for respect and geopolitical status as a particular consideration for Russia; this issue did not arise for any other countries cited as Europe’s key relationship. Where the US was cited, a willingness to use force or shoulder international responsibilities also scored significantly.
One of the surprises in the poll was the great diversity of responses on Europe’s key vulnerabilities in 2020. Energy dependency was the clear front runner – 17% of votes cast compared to 11% for immigration, the second highest – but the main story here was the ‘long tail’ of vulnerabilities identified by just one or two people, leading to 27 separate vulnerabilities being cited in total. Demographic issues in Europe, especially its ageing population, were the third highest scoring issue with 9% of votes.
Participants felt that the most important thing Europe could do to reduce its vulnerabilities was to invest in energy efficiency or alternative energy (14%). Immigration accounted for both the second and third highest scorers, but with an interesting nuance: better integration of immigrants came second (10%), while limiting immigration came third (8%). Investing in stability in Europe’s near neighbourhood also scored highly.
Finally, there was, predictably, a great range of ideas for unexpected wild card events between now and 2020. The most widely predicted shock was a nuclear exchange between states, followed by two different scenarios of Chinese collapse. (See the full results for the complete list of wild cards imagined.) Overall, participants proved rather pessimistic: 88% of ideas were gloomy rather than upbeat. Two participants imagined a democratic China, however – and one cheery colleague wondered whether we might witness the outbreak of world peace.
by Alex Evans | Dec 20, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Europe and Central Asia
I spoke at a conference organised by the Institute for Environmental Security in Brussels earlier this week. (Here’s the speech I gave, which updates the argument from The Post-Kyoto Bidding War to take account of Bali – and in particular the US’s shift from arguing for no binding targets for anyone, to arguing that if developed countries have binding targets, then so should developing ones.)
The overall theme of the conference was ‘from Bali to Poznan’ – the latter being the place in Poland where next year’s UNFCCC gathering will be held. With this in mind, the organisers secured a presentation from Poland’s Ambassador to the EU. You might have thought that the Poles would want to rise to the occasion and capitalise on the post-Bali good cheer among Eurocrats. Not a bit of it: instead, we had a rambling discussion that was heavy on Poland’s impressive track record in energy efficiency but light on strategy.
As one of the other speakers at the conference later remarked, Poland is essentially emerging from a rather, well, crazy period. It needs to show other EU member states that it’s not just a big member state, but that it has big ideas as well. A good start to that enterprise might be to have some kind of narrative about why it wanted to host the halfway point conference on the road from Bali to Copenhagen. As things stand now, officials who work on climate change are quietly dreading the prospect of the Poles chairing the summit…
by David Steven | Oct 11, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global system
Is it just me or are good statistics on climate change ridiculously hard to get hold of?
The natural point of comparison is with development indicators. Want a ranking of where countries sit on the rich/poor continuum? Try the Human Development Index which “measures the average achievements in a country in three basic dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, knowledge and a decent standard of living.” Data are available for 177 countries and stretch back to 1980. There are oodles of similar indicators.
Or want to know about HIV/AIDS in, say, Mozambique. UNAIDS has stats for 2006 that include:
- Basic facts – number of people living with HIV; prevalence rate; deaths due to AIDS; number of AIDS orphans etc.
- Behavioural data – proportion of men and women who have had casual sex in the past twelve months; who used a condom when they last had casual sex; who had sex before they were fifteen; and who correctly identify ways to prevent HIV.
- Policy data – in particular, how much of its own money a government is spending on the epidemic.
The data are easy to find, easy to read and have been carefully selected. They’re also there for every country in a standard format. Read them and you feel you really know the epidemic.
So, let’s turn to climate change.
A dataset for concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere is not too hard to find, but I am struggling to find a current figure for all greenhouse gases, expressed as a carbon dioxide equivalent. Search for CO2e and you hit a Cantor Fitzgerald trading company and plenty of glossaries, but not the figure itself. (Alex tells me it’s around 455ppm.)
What about emissions? What I’d like to know, for as many countries as possible, are:
- Per capita emissions and trend (perhaps as an average rate of change over a 5-year period).
- Greenhouse gas intensity (how much a country emits to make a dollar of GDP) and trend.
- Annual rate of emissions growth, dating back to at least 1990 (the Kyoto baseline year).
- Climate stabilisation targets that countries have taken on under Kyoto or have set themselves.
EarthTrends gives me per capita emissions, but only to 2003, and only for greenhouse gases separately; a single CO2e figure could be calculated quite easily, but it’s not there. It’s similar for carbon intensity – data to 2002 and no data at all for other greenhouse gases. Getting their data is a pain too. No rankings. Hard to get all a country’s data in one place. And so on.
UNFCC, meanwhile, has data on total CO2e emissions. For countries without Kyoto targets, however, data often stops at 1994. The Kyoto countries make it to 2004.
Wikipedia lists Kyoto obligations and also EU targets for 2012, but I haven’t been able to find a comprehensive list of the patchwork of formal and informal commitments countries have taken on. Even the US has a target, to reduce greenhouse gas intensity by 18% between 2002 and 2012.
So…
- Climate data is patchy and often dated…
- …by God, it’s hard to find…
- …and even when you find it, the formatting is terrible. Look again at the HIV/AIDS data – a masterpiece of selection and layout in comparison.
- Rankings are also under-supplied. The US target sounds (even!) less impressive when you see that it produces only a couple of thousand dollars of GDP for each tonne of carbon emitted, putting it 39th on this list, and 4.5 times less efficient than top country, Switzerland.
- We are a million miles (kilometres?) from settling on standard data measures. When a leader says they favour a 550ppm atmospheric ceiling – do they mean carbon or carbon equivalent?
- CO2e, surely, should be the gold standard. What do we need to do to get everyone to accept that?
Look, this is dull but, surely also, a big deal.
Information – like a stable climate – is a global public good. You badly need everyone to be using the same data sources. Even if they disagree, you want them to do so using a common set of facts and concepts (that’s why we have the IPCC).
And that’s before we get to data on the human drivers – the opinions, attitudes, decisions and behaviours on which a low-carbon economy must be built (or not as the case may be). As Alex mentioned earlier, we’re writing a paper on this at the moment for the London Accord.
What do electorates believe and why? What deal on climate are they prepared to accept? Which groups are driving the debate in country? And what influence are they seeking to exert?
Look how illuminating behavioural data are for HIV/AIDS. In Mozambique, 84% of men have had sex with a casual partner in the last year, while only a third of them used a condom the last time they had casual sex. There, in a nutshell, you have the reason why one in six adults are HIV positive.We have nothing as good as this for climate.
There is one consolation though. When so much of this problem seems almost beyond solving, at least this is one deficit that can be quickly, easily and cheaply put right.
Update: Real Climate points out that there are two different CO2 equivalents floating around:
Firstly, it is often used to group together all the forcings from the Kyoto greenhouse gases (CO2, CH4, N2O and CFCs), and secondly to group together all forcings (including ozone, sulphate aerosols, black carbon etc.). The first is simply a convenience, but the second is what matters to the planet.
Imagine debating the economy if people used terms like ‘inflation’ or ‘GDP’ to mean completely different things!
by Alex Evans | Sep 27, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity
So, what to make of the UN Secretary-General’s high level event on climate change in New York earlier this week? First, a few quick observations in no particular order:
- Heavyweight proposal of the day: Angela Merkel stepped up her call for future climate policy to be based on the principle of national emissions entitlements converging towards equal per capita levels, calling for this approach not only at the climate summit but in a subsequent speech to the entire UN General Assembly too.
- Intriguing leftfield idea of the day: Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa offered to leave 920 million barrels of oil in the ground, to avoid the emissions that would result from burning it. And in return: “Ecuador requests to the humanity a small contribution of 5 dollars per barrel” – $4.6 billion, in other words. By a very rough reckoning, that works out at a little over $10 per tonne of CO2 of emissions reduction – when current market prices for crude are $80 a barrel. Someone draw up a contract, quick.
- Speaker of the day: Bharrat Jagdeo of Guyana, who strode up the podium and spoke brilliantly, without notes, making eye contact with everyone in the room. And everyone sat up and took notice. Especially good was the moment when Jagdeo singled out EC President Barroso and with exquisite politeness, kicked him round the room for Brussels’ cack-handed reform of the EU Sugar Protocol. Just goes to show: oratorical skills still count. Especially at UN summits where everyone else mumbles through their script.
- Charmer of the day: Arnold Schwarzenegger. Anyone who begins their speech to the UN General Assembly by asking a room full of heads of state to “give a big hand” to his wife has considerable panache (video here).
Here‘s the SG’s full summary document, which makes explicit reference to limiting warming to two degrees C – which is excellent – and to the need to halve emissions by 2050. The latter is a bit odd, given that in its fourth assessment report, the IPCC’s policy working groupmakes clear that as far as limiting warming to between 2 and 2.4 degrees is concerned, a global cut of 50 per cent by 2050 is the bare minimum (the range the IPCC uses is between 50 and 85 per cent by 2050); but still, there’s time to correct this confusion before the Bali summit in December.
What to make of the summit overall?
First, this was a big win for Ban Ki-Moon. He garnered a great tally of heads of state and heads of government, and successfully raised the stakes on climate change ahead of Bali – which was the central objective in holding this summit.
Second, virtually all speeches made concurred on the level of urgency on tackling climate change, and that too is significant progress.
Third, the nascent battle between a future based on targets and timetables versus a future of voluntary action and technology partnerships is starting to get intense. Merkel is emerging as the most articulate and clear-sighted proponent of the former. But to see what she’s up against, see the speeches made by Condi Rice and – especially – Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer. The latter set out seven key principles for an “equitable and effective post-2012 international climate change arrangement”, as follows – with words like “binding” and “targets” notable by their absence (the word “aspirational”, on the other hand, appeared in Downer’s speech three times):
- First, the principle of comprehensiveness. This means that all economies contribute to shared global goals in ways that are equitable, and environmentally and economically effective.
- Second, is the need to respect different domestic circumstances and capacities.
- Third, is the importance of flexibility and recognising diverse approaches and practical actions.
- Fourth, is the important role for co-operation on low and zero emissions energy sources and technologies, particularly coal and other fossil fuels.
- Fifth, is the importance of addressing forests and land use in the post-2012 arrangement.
- Sixth, is the importance of promoting open trade and investment.
- And, seventh, is the importance of support for effective adaptation strategies.
Much of the media coverage of the summit interpreted Ban Ki-Moon’s summary comment that “All other processes or initiatives should be compatible with the UNFCCC process and should feed into it, facilitating its successful conclusion” as an implied swipe at the US / Australian approach. But the AP6-ers can handle that tactic. Over the autumn, we’ll probably find that they’re more than happy to pledge their loyalty to the UNFCCC process: it’s just that their vision for it is as the home for adaptation, financing and technology, while mitigation is “dealt with” elsewhere.
All in all, it’s going to be a pretty interesting few months between now and Bali…
by David Steven | Sep 13, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity
Discussing climate change with a group of campaigners and activists yesterday, I was struck by the fact that, despite all the recent attention for the issue, we still lack a common language for talking about possible solutions.
With Bali fast approaching, it seems clear to me that, without this language, negotiators will largely be talking past each other – a confusion that the media will happily amplify.
Any strategy for checking climate change has to start with a global stabilisation target which places a ceiling on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
The need for a stabilisation target is absolutely fundamental. It’s a concept that, by now, should be as deeply embedded in public discourse as key economic indicators such as the inflation rate.
Leave aside for a moment, the dwindling number of people who utterly reject the existence of man made climate change, and imagine that the others can be divided into two groups:
- climate control hawks, who believe that we face impending disaster and must act immediately; and
- climate control doves, who expect temperatures to rise gradually and believe we have many years to switch to a low carbon economy.
Whether unconsciously or not, both groups share the assumption that the concentration of greenhouse gases can only be allowed to rise to a certain level. Like interest rate hawks and doves, they disagree on how high we can afford that level to be.
As my co-editor Alex Evans puts it, the principle of a stabilisation target acts as a core element of an operating system for global climate control.
My opinion is that the existence of a stabilisation target is paramount, but it matters much less what initial level for that target is agreed.
The European Commission talks about 450-550 parts per million (this figure expresses all greenhouse gases as carbon dioxide equivalents). The upper end of this range (or even higher!) would be fine by me.
Just set a stabilisation target. And do it now.
Next ask scientists to review the latest evidence every so often and offer advice on whether the target is too high, or too low. Governments can then choose to respond to this advice or explain to the world why they are ignoring it.
The equivalent would be a central bank that did not set the interest rate itself, but gave its finance minister an independent opinion on what the rate should be.
Why is this so important? Three reasons.
First, it will be much easier to set the first stabilisation target if climate control hawks are prepared to allow the doves a little latitude. The US, for example, is never going to agree to a super-stringent stabilisation target based on its current interpretation of the science. Fine, we should say. But what target could you live with?
Second, it allows both hawks and doves to hedge their bets a little. Doves can await scientific evidence that will show that we’ve all got a little carried away with the doomsday scenario. Hawks will grimly expect our understanding of the consequences of climate change to steadily worsen. In practice, real world climate events – or the absence of them – are likely to force our hand.
Third, it provides a chance that some pace will get injected into the negotiation process. Nowadays, it is fashionable to dismiss Kyoto, but at least that accord showed that agreement was possible.
We badly need a new climate control framework and we need it quickly. We also want that framework to have a permanency, even if its provisions are periodically made more or less stringent.
A global climate control operating system should be negotiated once and once only. From then on, we will merely be tweaking its variables.
(More on sharing out emissions later…)
