What are the main development issues related to climate change?
Much of the research in the United Nations system, especially at the secretariat and some of the agencies, has emphasised the important links between climate change and development, and the need for strong and immediate action on a global scale. The main messages are:
TO address climate change, the international community needs to seriously address development.
DEVELOPING countries must be able to meet their people’s basic energy needs while trying to achieve low-carbon development.
CLIMATE change impacts are already upon us. We cannot afford to wait.
EFFECTIVELY linking climate change and development will require a big investment push, particularly for renewable energy, with a strong public sector role, supported by adequate international finance.
PUBLIC investments need to be “front-loaded” to shape developing countries’ long-term energy infrastructure and development pathways.
AS the most vulnerable are already suffering the impacts of climate change, there is an urgent need for developed country (or Annex 1 to use United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change parlance) governments to greatly increase and fast-track financial support for climate change mitigation and adaptation measures.
All this puts the Paris negotiations in context. We must find a way to address sustainable development and climate change together. This is the only solution which is ethically defensible and broadly politically acceptable.
What are the links between climate change and development?
Climate change will severely compromise development prospects. Failure to act on climate change could reduce the size of the world economy at mid-century, in 35 years, by up to a quarter.
Taking action to address climate change will be costly, but not nearly as costly as inaction.
We have waited too long to take serious action, and the delay has been costly, both in terms of impacts already being suffered and the speed with which hydrocarbon-based energy needs to be phased out.
Still, the transformation of the world’s energy economy should spur a technological and industrial revolution. Many developing countries are well placed today to benefit from such a revolution.
How would you summarise priorities for action going forward?
The key elements of our action plan include:
AN international programme of technology cooperation and knowledge-sharing on climate change adaptation and mitigation technologies including energy efficiency.
A GLOBAL programme of support for renewable energy in developing countries, including support for feed-in tariffs, enabling developing countries to by-pass or “leapfrog” the fossil-fuel energy stage of economic development.
A GLOBAL programme of support to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, notably through promotion of sustainable forestry and rewarding forest-dependent communities for sustainable management of forests.
A PROGRAMME of support, with adequate funding, for quick action on urgent adaptation measures in vulnerable developing countries.
These are all areas where there is broad consensus, and progress on a global programme of cooperation should be possible in the near term in Copenhagen.
Getting action started early and actual experience demonstrate what works and what actual costs are, showing that stronger action is possible and affordable while building trust through cooperative action between developed and developing countries. At the moment, such trust is missing.
How would you distinguish this from the more conventional climate action views?
Actually, there are quite a few similarities as the gap has narrowed among those calling for urgent action, especially following the experience of recent years, after Kyoto and Copenhagen.
The main difference is probably related to the role and importance of public finance — compared with carbon markets and private finance — to address the climate challenge.
We stress the importance of a big public investment push up-front, to “crowd in” private investment. The right policies can help attract foreign investment, but they’re not enough. For example, in poor countries, where renewable energy is not affordable to the average person, there is little incentive for investment by the private sector. So, the government needs to provide incentives to invest, and also to undertake some investment, e.g. in certain key infrastructure.
One incentive to investment in renewable electricity, which has worked well in Europe and elsewhere, is feed-in tariffs offering guaranteed prices to renewable power generators. In developed countries, rate payers effectively pay this subsidy, but in developing countries, that is not easy. So, international financial support for feed-in tariff programmes would be one way of quickly rushing up renewable energy investments in developing countries.
With increased scale, will come cost reductions; with increased incomes, will come greater ability to pay. In time, the subsidies will become unnecessary.
What are the main areas of contention related to climate change mitigation and adaptation between developing countries and developed countries, particularly in Europe and America?
Developing countries do not see sufficient evidence that developed countries are willing to play their part in addressing this challenge — to bear a fair share of the responsibility for mitigation and adaptation, given their historical and contemporary contributions to the problem.
The commitments on the table from developed countries to 2020 are simply not adequate to achieve what science suggests is needed to keep the temperature rise this century to below 2 °C.
Some developed countries, on the other hand, want to see quantified commitments from big emitting developing countries like China and India, and are trying to replace the Kyoto Protocol and the UNFCCC.
Developing countries have resisted assuming such quantified emission targets, insisting on the Kyoto Protocol distinction between Annex 1 (developed) and non-Annex 1 countries.
Developing countries also insist that any actions to which they might commit should be matched by commitments from Annex 1 countries to provide the requisite financial and technological support.
Nevertheless, most countries have made voluntary commitments ahead of the Paris CoP. Recent analysis considers those by most developing countries fitting when considering their historic and contemporary contributions to global warming, but have found most developed countries disappointingly wanting.
Meanwhile, large developing countries have recently announced domestic policies to slow their emissions growth in the coming years, and have invested heavily in renewable energy and other low-carbon energy sources.
How are the impacts of climate change being felt by people by different political, social and economic groups?
Sea levels are rising, glaciers and ice are melting. People are struggling to cope and to adapt in poor countries. Even developed countries are facing consequences which are taxing their own adaptive capacities (from flooding in New Orleans to drought and fires in Australia and California).
In Ladakh, India, people are building artificial glaciers as natural glaciers rapidly shrink. They can do this for awhile, but the artificial glaciers still depend on seasonal glacier melt, so when the natural glaciers are gone, there will be no fallback.
Small-island developing states are on the front lines of climate change. The president of the Maldives once held a cabinet meeting in the sea to dramatise the country’s plight, even as it accumulates funds to purchase land in another country to relocate its population. The Maldives has set a target date for becoming a zero carbon economy — of little significance to addressing the global climate change problem, but nevertheless highly symbolic of the willingness of developing countries to play their part in addressing this global challenge.
The writer is the coordinator for economic and social development at the Food and Agriculture Organisation; received the 2007 Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought