TeaHere’s a tiresome predicament for global environmental conferences. The prospect of Armageddon is over, many words have been spoken, few commitments have been made to keep the negotiations from failing at the last minute, and the weary delegates finally go home. Then everything happens very little.
It would have been even less if there had not been pressure for the conference to set goals. For precisely this reason, the conference record of the last 50 years (since the first environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972) points to environmental pessimism.
Yet it would be wrong to think that nothing has been achieved. Much has happened, though very slowly – for the lack of speed of which the world, especially its poor, will pay the price.
The global scenario can be compared to how Delhi and its surrounding areas become a chamber of poisonous gas every winter. The disaster was predicted for decades, and some corrective action was taken, but today the reality is disaster.
When the Club of Rome published “Limits to Growth” in 1972, the book sold well but its central message was also ridiculed by many. While the book brought to mind pollution and resource depletion, the Stockholm Conference in the same year was downplayed by many experts, especially in the West. Although over a hundred countries participated, only two heads of government participated: the host country and Indira Gandhi. But he sent the wrong message to the occasion by saying that poverty is the biggest polluter.
Nevertheless, it was a path breaking event. To mark its twentieth anniversary, the 1992 “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro created the Framework Convention on Climate Change.
More conventions led to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which called on some three dozen developed economies to reduce their carbon emissions below 1990 base levels. Ratification took eight years until 2005, in which emissions targets were set from time to time.
As each target was missed, and the base year was reset, more conventions followed (Copenhagen-2009, Paris-2015, etc.). Now the principles as well as the targets were scrapped, most importantly that the major polluters are primarily responsible for limiting and undoing the damage. Some scoff at the idea now.
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soh where are we? The world is 80 percent of its way to the disaster threshold of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. Since emissions will continue even after crossing that red line, peak temperatures of 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels seem plausible.
The world is two-thirds of the way there in terms of total carbon mass in the atmosphere. So climate change is upon us. Crores of people, mostly the poor, will pay the price. Many parts of the world will no longer be habitable. The destruction of the species will accelerate. Governments will find that they do not have the resources to deal with the ecological, economic and human consequences. This will increase the disaster.
The good news is that many wealthy, post-industrial economies have begun to drop their emissions levels. Many more (including India) have reduced the energy-intensity of economic activity, even as the energy used is getting cleaner. The “net zero” goal is still decades away, but the essentially messy goal-setting to achieve net zero has also been a (delayed) success.
What are the lessons of these 50 years? First, despite the enthusiasm at conferences such as Sharm el-Sheikh, such meetings sometimes move the needle – though usually too late. Sometimes the needle goes backwards, such as when Ukraine is at war, prompting anti-coal countries to reactivate thermal power stations. Second, despite repeated promises, no rich country is going to pay a significant amount to help poor countries tackle climate change, even though the poor did not cause the problem.
Third, very few people are willing to change their carbon-emitting lifestyles (starting with food habits). Without that, technology would provide some solutions but never a complete answer. Finally, the disastrous aspect of “development” cannot be dealt with until national accounts are redefined to include damage to natural property in mathematics. Such re-definition and inclusion was recommended in 2013 by a committee headed by Cambridge don, Partha Dasgupta. Its report in the Environment Ministry has been forgotten.
By special arrangement with Business Standard
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