The lead up to this year’s UN Conference on Climate Change was pretty bland. The meetings got underway in Doha on November 26 without the prelude of the picturesque Cabinet meetings near the top of world.
In the lead up to the annual UN Conference on Climate Change three years ago, Nepal’s government held a very high-level cabinet meeting at 5,242 meters at Kala Patthar, near Everest base camp. There they signed a ten-point Everest Declaration calling on the world to combat climate change and pledged to work together with other nations towards this endeavour.
PHOTO: REPUBLICA FILE PHOTO
The Cabinet meeting in Kala Patthar was well attended—24 of the 27 cabinet members were present. They flew into Lukla a day earlier to acclimatize. After medical tests, they were airlifted to Kala Patthar with supplementary oxygen and a retinue of doctors in tow.
Against the backdrop of sharply rising, jagged, snow-capped peaks, cabinet ministers called on the world to “Save the Himalayas”. They had to speak through microphones. The strong winds sweeping through the meeting made it impossible to hear anyone. Whether the world heard their speeches is uncertain. But the image endured.
The pictures were of a rugged windswept peak staring down at a cabinet that appeared entirely overwhelmed. The cabinet meeting itself seemed to pale in comparison. Those images captured the emotions at the very heart of the climate debate: a poor nation state facing up to an enormous Climate Crisis that had not been its making.
It is an image that has endured. But it is not the whole story.
Had the cabinet trekked up to Kala Patthar, instead of just jetting in and out, they would have seen the grim faces of those in the front lines of the impacts of climate change. Along the route, in the lodges, tea shops and monasteries, in the traders herding their yaks and porters ferrying their loads, in the marginal fields eking out a rick bowl, they would have noticed the absence of schools, health clinics, housing, drinking water, sanitation, lack of agricultural services or any trace of the State.
Had the Cabinet trekked up to Kala Patthar, they might have asked if the failures of their own government in providing basic economic and social services were equally responsible for exposing their citizens to the impacts of climate change.
There is little doubt, at least to climate believers, that historic emissions from industrialized developed countries are responsible for climate change. Global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions must be cut by at least 50 percent from 1990 levels by 2050 if the world is to limit temperature increase to 2 degree centigrade and prevent climate change from spiralling out of control.
Last month the World Bank released a new study outlining severe ‘displacement and disruptions’ that would result from continued global warming. Titled ‘Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4oC Warmer World Must be Avoided,’ the report offered an almost apocalyptic vision of a future if current trends in temperature increases were not halted. Rising sea levels, increased coastal inundation, severe heat waves, rainfall, droughts, shifting agricultural patterns and decreasing crop yields held significant implications for efforts to reduce poverty.
The new World Bank report and other studies repeatedly confirm that the impacts of climate change fall disproportionately on the poor. Countries like Nepal, dependent on rain-fed monsoons and fragile eco-systems for example, and without adequate infrastructure, capacity or resources to adapt to sharper climatic variations remain the most vulnerable.
Countries best prepared against climate impacts are the industrialized nations that have already built the infrastructure to address poverty. Strong social and economic infrastructure—good schools, hospitals, roads, agriculture practices and disaster management, for example—are better equipped to manage the impacts of climate change. Countries with such infrastructure are of course the richer developed countries. The best measure of adaption to the impacts of climate change, it turns out, are the same as those that reduce poverty.
The challenge of climate change is the challenge of poverty simply recast through the lens of the environment. It reduces to the same issues on poverty, about why poor countries are poor and remain poor.
Developed countries can be held accountable for historic GHG that are attributed to global warming. Should they also be held accountable for the failure of poor countries to build adequate social and economic infrastructure, or for the persistence of poverty?
The current UN led multi-lateral approach to addressing climate change is pegged on the hope that developed countries will acknowledge their responsibility for historic emissions, cut their emissions, provide emissions space for developing countries and pay for the cost of adaptation. It would be great if this rhetoric could yield results. But it hasn’t and it won’t in the future.
The current climate narrative is not working. As the curtains were drawn in Doha on phase I of the Kyoto Protocol—the current global agreement to reduce emissions that expires in 2012—there is little common ground between countries on the next set of agreements. Commitments for financial support from developed countries, US $30 billion by 2012 and another US $100 billion annually by 2020, have failed to materialize. In the meantime, there has been little else to do except squabble about the mechanism by which this money, once available, will be spent.
After Doha brought to an end a promising start on climate that stretched over a decade and half, the world must now rapidly seek out a new narrative for a response to climate change. Casting the issue merely with developed countries as the perpetuators and poorer nations as the victims, simply isn’t working. We need a new narrative that offers practical and achievable solutions.
First, delink adaptation from mitigation. Poor countries do little for mitigation talks, except perhaps scurrying behind whichever bloc happens to be offering more goodies at that moment. Instead, poor countries should disengage from developing countries and emerging economies on this issue. They should partner with like-minded non-governmental agencies and organizations to ratchet up pressure on developing countries and emerging economies to come to an agreement on emissions reduction.
Second, merge the discussion on adaptation with discussions on poverty. Evolve a cohesive framework on poverty reduction by collating disparate strands from trade, millennium development goals and climate. Emphasis could then be placed on securing greater resources for reducing poverty and ensuring it is targeted appropriately.
Third, instead of just blaming rich countries, poor countries must also look more closely at why they continue to fail their people on climate and poverty. Is there more our government could be doing, within the constraints of meagre resources, to benefit those in need? Non-governmental organizations must begin to spotlight the failing of local governments more honestly, instead of merely reducing climate to the failings of rich countries.
To start with, our cabinet should trek to Kala Patthar for the next cabinet meeting there.
The author is a consultant on energy and environment, and founded ReVera Information, a market research firm in New Delhi
>bishal_thapa@hotmail.com
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