Global action against climate change: The unfinished business with Durban summit

The failed Durban Summit

The much-hyped UN-sponsored global summit of some 194 nations in Durban, South Africa from the last week of November to the first week of December 2011 to come up with a consensual programme of action against the perceived threat of climate change ended up with ‘no action’ at all.

According to press reports, the summit, which overshot its time limit by some 36 hours, had finally decided, as a compromise solution when the warring parties were unwilling to yield, to work toward agreeing on a common action programme by 2015 and implement the same as from 2020 (available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/dec/10/un-climate-change-summit-).

This was no good news to those who expected a quick and resolute action against the so-called ‘manmade climate change’ that, according to them, has threatened the very survival of species on this planet Earth. But this is not a new experience for world nations.

Ever since the issue of global warming and consequential climate change was brought to the forefront of discussion by world nations in 1992 at a historic summit assembled by the United Nations in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil in 1992, there had been many disappointments: The indecisiveness of world nations that matter in reaching a consensus had been marked in failed summits in Kyoto in Japan in 1997 and in Copenhagen in Denmark in 2009.

India’s angry reaction

The summit in Durban failed because some noteworthy nations like India, China and Venezuela made the strongest protests against a common programme suggested by the European Union to get all nations to agree on a programme of action with penalties for non-adherence.

This was the point of contention for the Indian Minister of Environment, Srimathi Jayanthi Natarajan, to retort angrily: “Am I to sign a blank cheque and give away the livelihoods and sustainability of 1.2 billion Indians without knowing even what the EU roadmap contains?”

Her point was clear: It is the developed countries which are responsible for the global warming and climate change and they now try to hold emerging nations like India responsible for the global malady. For obvious reasons, China and Venezuela too supported the Indian stand, making it difficult for the nations present to agree on a common programme of action.

The common thinking: You are the culprit and not me

Recently, the writer rode a three-wheeler in the midst of windy rains and the operator invariably turned the discussion to weather and weather change in Sri Lanka. He expressed his conclusion boldly: “With all these vehicles on the road that spew out all those polluted gases with no concern about us, it is not unusual for the weather patterns in the country to become freak and unpredictable.” He was blaming all the other vehicle users and not himself for the malady, ostensibly because his vehicle was a small one compared to the other big polluters on the road. His charge was in fact an echoing of the Indian concern in a small way: You big fellows are the rascals and don’t try to put the blame and the burden on us.

The greenhouse effect

The charge by many today is that climate change has occurred in many parts of the world due to continuous global warming, a development which they perceive as the outcome of a phenomenon called ‘the greenhouse effect’.

Global warming, they also contend, has led to a faster melting of the glaziers in the Northern and Southern Poles, causing sea levels to rise and submerge many low lying countries including Great Britain.

The villain they further argue has been the manmade economic activities that have caused the emission of various gases in to the atmosphere blocking the heat released by the cooling earth from escaping into the vast emptiness of the solar system.

These gases known as greenhouse gases mainly consist of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide methane, nitrogen oxide and various sulphurs which are released to the atmosphere ironically by both human action and nature’s periodical reactions.

The original greenhouse effect: Favourable to the world

It was nearly 200 years ago in 1824 that the French Mathematician and Physicist Joseph Fourier first presented the world with the theory of ‘greenhouse effect,’ which was further developed, documented and proved by other scientists in his era like the Frenchman Claude Pouillet, Britisher John Tyndall and the Swede Swante Arrhenius. But their theory of greenhouse effect was presented in a context quite different from what it has been perceived today.

According to Fourier and others, greenhouse gases have helped the planet Earth to be hotter than what it would have been given the long distance of the Sun from the Earth and its relatively smaller size. So, the implication is that the greenhouse effect has saved the Earth from becoming a ball of ice and thereby making it an uninhabitable place for species. Hence, greenhouse gases have worked as the antidote of the more disastrous phenomenon that would have naturally occurred and now known as ‘global cooling’.

The various ice ages with which the planet Earth had been afflicted in the past are testimonies to the harmful effects of such a global development. As such, modern civilisations should be thankful to the greenhouse gases and the consequential greenhouse effect for making the planet Earth a habitable and liveable place.

The new villain of greenhouse effect

But towards the end of 1970s, some scientists had found that man had been overdoing his job of keeping the Earth warm. With rapid economic advancement in some parts of the globe, man had been using in increasing volumes sources of energy that produced greenhouse gases as an inevitable by-product.

The concentration of these gases in the atmosphere, it has been claimed, has caused the surface temperature of the Earth to rise, not phenomenally but at a slow rate of some 0.6C over the 50 years from 1956 to 2006. If this trend continues unabated for the next 100 years, the surface temperature of the Earth will settle at a higher level by some 1.2C and over the next 1,000 years, by 12.0C.

These fears were further heightened by a Review of the Economics of Climate Change by British economist Sir Nicholas Stern for the British Government in 2006: according to this review, the manmade destruction to environment is irreversible, equal to about 5% of annual global output and will have potential adverse impacts on water resources, food production and health. It is therefore no surprising for people to consider this as the greatest doom which the modern civilisation has faced.

To give credence to these fears, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change or IPCC, headed by the Indian scientist Rajendra Pachauri, reported in its report in 2007 that human actions are the cause of the global warming, contributing a massive 90% or even greater amount for such change.

Since such temperature increases are manmade, scientists call it ‘anthropogenic climate change’ or ACC. To put ACC to an end and thereby save species living on the planet Earth, it has been suggested that a common global action programme should be implemented by all nations of the world.

The failed Durban Summit was convened to agree on such a common programme which, had it been approved, would have been implemented by all the nations that would have endorsed it.

The common action needed: Global public goods

So, the consensus in both developed and developing countries is that the world has to do something to stop this catastrophe, now and at any cost. But the benefits of such a course of action are universal and could be enjoyed whether a country have paid for it or not.

Hence, the chances are that any smart person would play the game according to the rules laid in the folklore of Seven Itinerants and the Roadside Rest (Seven Andies in an Ambalama).

According to the folklore, each itinerant, in an enterprise of making a common soup, just pretends that he puts some rice into the pot, relying on the belief that his colleagues would make an actual contribution. So, the intention of each itinerant is to be a free rider, but at the end, since there is no rice in the pot, they all end up drinking just hot water.

Economists call this ‘the public good problem’. Since the public good in question is to be produced in the whole world by all, it is a problem of producing ‘global public goods’.

Global public goods are not different from ordinary public goods which economists have been talking about since early 20th century. They all have the same unique features attributable to ordinary public goods.

The first feature is that a person can enjoy it whether he pays for it or not. Therefore, simply by charging a price, the supplier cannot deny him the opportunity to have it or in the terminology of economists, exclude him from consumption. This is known as ‘the non – excludability’ principle.

The second feather is that one person’s use of the benefit does not reduce the use of same by another. Therefore, all those who wish to enjoy the benefit can do so without reducing the amount of joy which his neighbour would have by using it, or again in the terminology of economists, users are not rivals to each other. This is known as ‘the non-rivalry principle’.  If both these features are present in a good simultaneously, such a good is called a public good, as distinct from a private good of which both are present simultaneously and therefore, it pays for someone to produce and supply it to users.

But private people have no incentive to produce public goods because they cannot make money by charging a price for same: The trick being users can enjoy them whether they pay for them or not. Hence, the governments have to produce and supply public goods because they can finance their costs by taxing their own people.

The prevention of global climate change would benefit everyone. But as in the case of national governments, there is no international body which can impose a tax on nations concerned and finance the cost of preventing the perceived catastrophe of climate change.

Hence, the financing costs, whether they are direct costs which countries have to bear or losses in economic growth and prosperity they have to undergo, have to be borne by all nations by common agreement. That is why the UN system tried to bring about this common agreement through periodical summit meetings it has arranged, but failed on all occasions.

The problems of global public goods

Two economists attached to the Institute of Development Studies of the University of Sussex, UK, Francisco Sagasti and Keith Bezanson, in a report they submitted to the Swedish Government in 2000 under the title ‘Financing and Providing Global Public Goods: Expectations and Prospects’ have identified several issues relating to saving the world from a potential climate change catastrophe as a public good.

The first is the diversity and the massiveness of the international cooperation required to implement a common programme. Any fruitful programme of action is required to commence at the global level and then scaled down to national and finally to local and individual levels. Since the problem is ingrained in everyday production and consumption, every human activity form the household upward has to be changed and attuned to the goals of a common programme. This is one of the impossibilities in a world where everyone is charging his neighbour for the malady and is not ready yet to accept his own contribution to it.  The second is how the programme could be implemented without hindering the aspirations and the goals of large developing countries like Brazil, china and India and all other newly emerging countries in the world.

Any action requires them to cut down their growth rates and rely on what is now known as ‘green energy’, but at a severe cost to the promised prosperity for their people. This is exactly the concern which the Indian Environmental Minister Jayanthi Natarajan voiced defiantly at the Durban Summit equally supported by China.

The third is the possibility of greenhouse gas spewing industries getting located in countries where there is relatively low economic activities and therefore have remained ‘good boys’ so far in relation to contributing to climate change catastrophe. They will therefore become culprits in the global arena, not today but in the future.

The potential such future culprits are the countries in Africa and South Asia including Sri Lanka which try to attract foreign direct investments without proper green screening or green appraisal. Since the emissions made by them will add to the global emissions, there is no effective saving of global environment by such relocations as they simply amount to, in the terminology of economist, ‘carbon leakages’.

The fourth is the unequal distribution of the suffering which the perceived climate change is said to inflict on nations. Developing countries are poised to suffer more in terms of sea level increases, prolonged droughts and unpredictable floods, destructions to food production initiatives and deterioration of health conditions.

The developed countries on the other hand will suffer from the same and are in a better position to face them. Hence, for a common global action programme, the strong should be prepared to support the weak which is akin to a global redistribution of wealth.

It gives ample opportunities for politicians and environmental activists in developing countries to make unreasonable demands: You are the culprits, so it is your duty to pay us now.

Going by this thinking, a Sri Lankan politician some years ago put forward the proposal that the developed countries should now compensate the developing countries because the so-called ‘carbon footprint’ of developed countries is much larger than that of developing countries.

Such demands will lead to unnecessary clashes among world nations driving them away from a consensual action plan. It also allows similar extremists in developed countries to come up with a ‘methane footprint’ and demand the world’s rice producing nations to compensate them for the methane emission which these countries would have made through rice production from time immemorial.

The fifth issue is why the people living today called the current generation make a sacrifice for the people to be borne in the future known as future generations. Economists call this the ‘inter-generational distribution issue’.

The UN-sponsored World Commission on Environment and Development, known as the Brundtland Commission naming after its chairperson Gro Harlem Brundtland, in its report titled ‘Our Common Future’ and released in 1987, tried to throw light on this issue by defining sustainability as this generation’s use of resources without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own.

Though such a sacrifice by the current generation for the sake of future generations is fair and good on paper, it is difficult to translate it into action by getting everyone’s support as has been revealed in the fiery debates at the Durban Summit.

This practical difficulty and the intellectual flaw in the argument led in 2010 Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow and four other leading economists redefine sustainability as a situation in which comprehensive wealth per person is not falling when it is measured by taking all the known and unknown costs into account.

When one considers these issues, the outcome of the Durban Summit had been well known in advance. In the absence of an international government with powers to levy taxation and collect such taxes by using all its powers, it is unlikely that the world nations can produce a global public good of the scale and volume needed for effectively halting the so-called Anthropogenic Climate Change.

(W.A. Wijewardena can be reached at [email protected])