Fighting Climate Change — Human Solidarity in a Divided World

Human Development Report 2007/2008: Fighting Climate Change: Human Solidarity in a Divided World. New York: UNDP, 2007. xvi + 384 pp. 29. 95 paperback. The pdf of this document can be downloaded at: http: //hdr. undp. org/en/reports/global/hdr2007-2008/ Climate change is one of the so-called ‘global environmental problems’— like water scarcity and biodiversity loss. In 1992 the UN member states established a Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system. A significant number of these countries subsequently developed the Kyoto Protocol to curb climate change. Secretary General of the UN Ban Ki-Moon has dubbed climate change ‘a defining issue of our era’. The wide realization that it is, is one key precondition for a new global compact to succeed the current inadequate Kyoto Protocol which will come to an end in 2012. That new compact is rather slow in coming about, for all kinds of reasons — not least amongst these: vested interests and asymmetries in responsibilities for having caused the problem and in suffering the consequences. At the end of 2007 the latest conference of the parties to UNFCCC met in Bali and agreed on a plan to try and arrive at a multilateral agreement in 2009. Prior to the Bali conference UNDP issued its Human Development Report: Fighting Climate Change: Human Solidarity in a Divided World (UNDP, 2007). For its factual basis for assessing the prospects of climate change and its impacts, the UNDP report leans heavily on recent reports on climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c). IPCC is a worldwide organization of scientists set up by the World Meteorological Organization and the UN Environmental Programme to periodically assess the state of knowledge about climate change, its causes and its impacts. It operates independently, albeit there has always been discussion about the way the IPCC process allows for influence by governments in the manner in which the Summary Reports (not the underlying technical reports) are phrased. UNDP, like many other international organizations (governmental and non-governmental), used the more technical reports to add its own elaborations of how to address the climate challenge in a development perspective. Climate change is a set of changes in climatic conditions globally — particularly ‘global warming’— arising from changes in the concentrations of a number of gases in the atmosphere due to emissions of ‘greenhouse gases’. The emissions of greenhouse gases are embedded in human activities — thus, they reflect development pathways. These gases originate from fossil fuel combustion (about 70 per cent) and form changes in land use (IPCC, 2007a). Climate change gives rise to impacts on both natural and social systems: changes in rainfall patterns affecting agricultural productivity and giving rise to droughts or floods; human health effects; sea level rise affecting people living in coastal zones; etc. As vulnerabilities in developing countries are relatively high, since they have less adaptive capacities or ‘resilience’, climate change will deepen poverty, through the loss of life, livelihoods, assets, infrastructure, and by affecting the sectoral origins of growth, the ability of the poor to engage in the non-farm sector, and by increasing inequality. If development is about the expansion of choice and freedoms (capabilities) that enable people to live lives that they value (Sen in UNDP, 2007: 28–9), and to the extent that these freedoms depend on the quality of the environment and on climatic conditions in particular, then climate change is a developmental issue. I believe it is therefore only appropriate that this aspect of climate change gets recognition, not only analytically but also in the post-Bali negotiations. Most certainly the UNDP report has added substantively to these negotiations. Global warming is currently still below 1°C (against the pre-industrial level), but may rise to 5–7°C toward the end of this century, unless action takes place. IPCC work as well as reviews by others (Stern, 2006) suggests there are thresholds at around 2°C and 3°C beyond which effects accelerate and/or new ones will become manifest. Beyond 2°C serious melting of Antarctic icecaps may add very significantly to sea level rise, and oceanic cold/warm water circulation patterns may be radically altered with profound additional climatic consequences. Basically, the UNDP Human Development Report adopts the above view on climate change and its impacts (see pp. 21–3) ; in some respects it is more concerned than the IPCC reports, for example, when it comes to the triggering of ‘catastrophic impacts’ (pp. 35–7) such as the icecap melting. In view of these and other risks UNDP opts for the 2°C cap on global warming, which, in the international policy discussion is a quite significant choice, given the implied demands on necessary societal action towards ‘decarbonization’ of the global economy. I admit to having no problem with this choice (Banuri and Opschoor, 2007). Responses to climate change may affect social activities, and thus also emission levels; here too developmental features are obvious. Societies exposed to climate change and its impacts may react to it by: (i) just absorbing it (absence of response action) and the damage it causes; (ii) adapting to it, thus reducing adverse consequences; and (iii) doing something about the causes of climate change, such as reducing emissions (or ‘mitigation’) (IPCC, 2007b, 2007c). The UNDP report relates climate change and trends therein to development and to driving forces behind climate change (Chapter 1). Several scenarios of possible development pathways are introduced, including a ‘sustainable emissions development pathway’. Chapter 2 looks at climate change-related shocks and the unequal vulnerabilities to these in agricultural production and food security, water stress and scarcity, sea level rise and extreme weather events, human health, and biodiversity. The third chapter is about avoiding dangerous climate change. Technically, there is a ‘mitigation potential’ to bring concentrations down to levels compatible with reducing warming to less than 2°C. The chapter deals with ways to realize these objectives (for example, carbon pricing, regulation and international co-operation). The final chapter presents the need for adaptation and discusses options for meeting this. In the course of this discussion, UNDP distils an ‘agenda for action’ that sketches strategies both for mitigation and adaptation, to which I will return below. I will first look at some of the analytical features of the report. Even though some impacts of climate change are already felt, most of the misery predicted will occur in future. Moreover, we are not sure (yet) about these impacts. So why would the world care and why would or should UNDP? UNDP's answer is that climate change confronts the world with ‘the threat of a twin catastrophe’: (i) an immediate threat to human development (for example, through the enhanced risk of not achieving development goals) ; and (ii) the threats to future generations. Climate change will undercut efforts to curb poverty and enhance human development and will hamper the sustained realization of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Lack of action in response to this threat would lead to costs or sacrifices that are likely to be very high, especially in developing contexts. Regarding future generations, humanity ‘…is living beyond its environmental means and running up ecological debts that future generations will be unable to repay’ (UNDP, 2007: 21–3). Future generations will ‘see our response to climate change as a measure of our ethical values’ (ibid. ). In this analysis one may recognize two types of arguments: ethical and economic ones. UNDP elaborates these as follows. In a ‘…one-country world inhabited by citizens who share a concern for the well-being of future generations, climate change mitigation would be an urgent priority’ as an insurance strategy against huge risks (ibid. , p. 39). This is a more or less ‘holistic’ approach based on enlightened collective (self-) interest labelled ‘climate stewardship’ and that position relates to elements such as irreversibility and inertia, publicness and interdependence, uncertainty and catastrophe, etc. (ibid. , pp. 58–60). One is reminded of notions such as ‘only one Earth’ (Ward and Dubos, 1972), on which ‘we’ have a ‘common future’ (WCED, 1987). Indeed, the Earth's atmosphere is a global public good. In much of the analysis on climate politics, this translates into applying simplistic social analysis by looking at society as a single entity, reflecting and deciding on climate change and what to do about it. As a first approximation, that may be all right, as long as it is followed by more sophisticated analysis, which UNDP does provide. But, still on the holistic track, one should, I feel, be concerned with the stewardship metaphor. A stewardship position is as strong as the priority given to concerns over climate conditions for future generations. That priority might evaporate, the more optimistic the present generation is about its descendants' economic and technical potentials. Why bother about our great grandchildren if they will have significantly more means than ‘us’ to mitigate (and/or adapt)? That is why I qualify this position as one of ‘weak climate stewardship’. A similar weakening might be the result of predominantly less risk aversive attitudes. In a more robust approach —‘strong climate stewardship’ I would call it — the irreversibility of large scale climate change is recognized to invoke the need to apply the Precautionary Principle (one of the Rio principles of sustainable development, mentioned only in passing by UNDP (see, for example, UNDP, 2007: 63). That principle asks for action in cases of large scale environmental change despite scientific uncertainty. The status of the principle is not unambiguous. UNDP could and should (in my view) have gone further to promulgate it as one of the foundations of sound and solidarity-based global climate mitigation policies. In an economic perspective the answer to the question of how much mitigation to undertake in the short run would depend on how costs and benefits are distributed over time and how future costs and benefits are weighted. The Stern Review of economic aspects of climate change (Stern, 2006) addresses the question by applying cost–benefit logic based on models of future effects on economic welfare looking ahead almost 200 (sic) years. Going far beyond mere income effects, re-weighing benefits and costs to correct for inequalities in economic welfare, and applying very low discount rates to avoid allowing time preference to diminish future effects, Stern concludes that the GDP-equivalents of welfare costs due to global warming if no action is taken would be five to twenty times as high as the costs of undertaking mitigative action (to stay within a 3°C boundary). So, mitigation would not only be morally preferable but also economically desirable. Critics of the review have argued that the choice of discount rate was arbitrary and did not match real and prevalent time preference. Putting higher rates into the model would seriously undermine the conclusion of Stern, and suggest much lower and less immediate mitigative action. More fundamental critiques (not reviewed by UNDP), such as Spash (2007), state that cost–benefit analysis cannot nor should be applied on technical grounds (and there is some methodological truth in that). Core elements in Spash's critique are that Stern et al. embrace the notion that economic growth is essential for welfare growth, that he deploys a utilitarian approach, and uses methods only applicable in case of reversibility and in settings of partial change. Even with methodological and ethical caveats, I feel it is worthwhile to know the results of cost–benefit approaches to these questions, since so many interest groups and decision makers (big and small) on climate, energy and land use, do take an interest in them. In a not unreasonable analysis, the welfare costs of inaction vis-à-vis climate change may by far outweigh the costs of action. Yet, whatever one feels about this, a more convincing economic argument might be that of mitigation as a risk insurance (as put forward by UNDP). But it is time we return – with UNDP – from these journeys into the future to the real world of today. That world is not a unified one, with a homogeneous ‘we’ thinking about whether or not to take future-oriented action. It is a politically fragmented world characterized by social and economic inequalities in access to resources, exposure to environmental degradation, opportunity and capability — a world in which decisions reflect the hegemony of the living rich rather than ethically balancing the interests of all. The previous subsection began by asking why the world should care about climate change. One entry back into the real world is to ask: does the world care, or rather: do economic and political agents care about climate change? Does the world care? In 1992 it formulated the UNFCCC with the ambitious goal to achieve stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system, within a time frame sufficient to enable, among others, ‘economic development to proceed in a sustainable was in and by the Kyoto Protocol that for the developed to lead to in greenhouse gas emissions of some per in (against As UNDP 2007 has been there was and an of The issue of the of the climate problem to the what should be who should do and how should the of that be climate change mitigation can be at least to stay within the 3°C (Stern, additional the 2°C might be as well (IPCC, 2007c). to per of global income by about gives a per to will have global benefits but in the first the costs of it will be large scale mitigation has to be in the of the world — the for and Development and the and it has become that — if only to that it will be — mitigation is also to be on a large scale in the energy and in countries land use change heavily to climate change (for example, many developing countries some of the are Yet, they are with a and are to engage in in the of Bali the world would to care, who then should developing countries large benefits of they will need and if they are to engage in — more in the short run in many developing including the and especially — there is an adaptation to be Most of the countries in the developing world have or to the current concentrations of greenhouse and they than on the of climate change. what mitigation will in the to twenty these damage and adaptation costs will rise in the If they not for the they who should the costs of are and political ones. 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