The Governance of Climate Change

David Held, Marika Theros, Angus Fane-Hervey, David Held, Marika Theros, Angus Fane-Hervey, David Held, Marika Theros, Angus Fane-Hervey, David Held, Marika Theros, Angus Fane-Hervey

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745652023, 9780745652016
• eBook ISBN: 9780745637839
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Climate change poses one of the greatest challenges for human society in the twenty-first century, yet there is a major disconnect between our actions to deal with it and the gravity of the threat it implies. In a world where the fate of countries is increasingly intertwined, how should we think about, and accordingly, how should we manage, the types of risk posed by anthropogenic climate change?

The problem is multi-faceted, and involves not only technical and policy specific approaches, but also questions of social justice and sustainability. In this volume the editors have assembled a unique
range of contributors who together examine the intersection between the science, politics, economics and ethics of climate change. The book includes perspectives from some of the world's foremost commentators in their fields, ranging from leading scientists to political theorists, to high profile policymakers and practitioners. They offer a critical new approach to thinking about climate change, and help express a common desire for a more equitable society and a more sustainable way of life.

Part 1

THE CHALLENGE OF CLIMATE CHANGE

1

The Challenge of Climate Change

David King

I want to start this chapter with a very simple idea: we have an enormous knowledge base. It has been developing rapidly over the previous 200 years. Then the computer revolution came along and we suddenly created the ability to retain our high level of sophistication and analysis for very complex phenomena involving enormous amounts of data. I would like to use that as a starting point. My thesis is going to be that, having this knowledge capability very largely cocooned into our universities, we have a rather poor system of moving that understanding into policy decision-making.

I have had eight years in government to become aware of this. I find in principle that in the private sector there is often a better understanding (examples range from the high-tech manufacturing sector to the insurance industry and venture capital) of managing opportunities and risks. There is, in short, a better understanding of the state of knowledge relevant to what these industries are doing than you often find in governments around the world.

My first example is an admittedly dramatic one but it’s one that I was involved in: the tsunami of 26 December 2004. The latter took place in a part of the world where there was no early warning system in place and, as a result, those of us watching it on television sets were aware that the tsunami was moving across a part of the planet, while those potentially affected were not. Eight hours later, the tsunami killed a number of people off the Kenyan coast. No warning mechanism was in place to see that the risk was managed. I, in turn, was asked to make a report to the Prime Minister on this matter. And, when I went to the United Nations and asked why there wasn’t an early warning system in place, I was told this was a random and unexpected event because tsunamis generally happen in the Pacific Ocean.

Given the sudden propagation of the wave, the people just off the coast of Banda Aceh, where the Sumatran trench runs and where the phenomenon originated, could not have been rescued: they were too close and things happened far too quickly for us to do anything. But what about the people in Sri Lanka? What about those in India? As the tsunami made its way across the ocean, 230,000 people died. My estimate is that 150,000 lives would have been saved with an early warning system in place.

But delving into the topic from a scientific point of view, was the tsunami really random and unforeseeable? The seismologists who study where volcanoes are, how plate tectonics work, and how the plates carry the great continents around are fully aware of the fact that, when two plates are in collision, there can be a section that gets ‘stuck’. The collision rate is slow, the plates move at about the rate of growth of one’s fingernails but nevertheless, since they carry an enormous mass, when a section gets stuck we know that great quantities of energy will be discharged. The longer it takes, the more pressure builds up, and, eventually, the bigger the event is going to be. So, as a matter of fact, the seismological community had predicted that a tsunami would occur along the Sumatran trench and said it would create a tsunami of Force 9. That was the prediction by the scientists: the tsunami was not unforeseen; people were in fact waiting for one.

To fully understand the extent of awareness of the imminent nature of the danger, we can recall how, in the summer of 2004, one Oxford scientist and one Californian scientist went on a trip to Sri Lanka, Indonesia and India to try to persuade the governments they needed an early warning system. They couldn’t find a mechanism for talking to somebody powerful enough to take on the idea of spending $30 million – that is all it would have cost – on the project. Now the point I want to make is: there is now an early warning system in place. We have learnt nothing in moving the state of knowledge to the decision-making process since 1985 when the previous big tsunami occurred off the Peruvian coast. In 1979, seismologists had said the next big tsunami was likely to occur off the Peruvian coast. My point is very simple, the knowledge is available: we understand enough to predict where these events will occur and with what force.

Going back to my initial theme – that is, knowledge and how well we use it – I suspect many in the academic community are feeling that economic modelling on a purely linear basis, which doesn’t include the possibility of non-linear, sudden events – an individual revolution or an economic collapse, a catastrophe – is hardly worth the computer time that is spent on it. But, the fact of the matter is that we know enough to include feedback terms – that is, non-linear terms – in modelling processes. The next task we should embrace is to think hard about causality and impacts that lead into catastrophic events that build up over long periods of time: the tsunami was simply an illustration of this latter point.

Striking a more positive note, we should also avoid being excessively pessimistic. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there were a remarkable series of improvements in human wellbeing. Going back to the Enlightenment, the Reformation or the more recent Industrial Revolution, all these historical periods have witnessed amazing transformations which can be measured in terms of increased life expectancy.

Life expectancy at the beginning of the twentieth century was around forty to forty-five years in most parts of the world. Today, it is more than seventy in most of the same places. If we wanted to describe the trend in life expectancy changes, we would conclude that in many parts of the world it is simply increasing linearly with time. That, in itself, is already a startling piece of information. In the United Kingdom, life expectancy is around eighty, and still increasing. I am going to attribute the UK’s progress to our infrastructure; to our cultural systems; to the revolutions that have occurred in science, agriculture, civil engineering, the cleaning-up of water provision, medicine and so on. I am also going to suggest that the British Empire enabled many of these developments in Europe to spread rapidly around the world. From the latter point of view, we see the benefits still playing through in many distant parts of the world.

This is the upside aspect of the twentieth century: a massive transformation in wellbeing. Yet as we move into the twenty-first century, we find that we are building up another sort of catastrophe resulting from this very good picture. The problem naturally arises from the fact that there is a necessary follow-through from increasing lifespan massively in short periods of time (e.g. 100 years) – namely, population explosion. Nation by nation, you find that, as wellbeing improves, female fecundity is eventually reduced to a level which is matched by the mortality rate. But before this is achieved, population growth is rapid. So, for example, during the Middle Ages in this country, out of seven or eight children born to each woman, only two would survive into maturity, and two is precisely the number needed for a stable population. But if, on the other hand, you have a sudden improvement in wellbeing and all seven or eight children survive into maturity, they will – excuse the scientific term – form breeding pairs. In turn. each of these breeding pairs will produce seven or eight children that will survive and form breeding pairs of their own, and so on. The result is easy to predict: an explosion.

Generally, population dynamics are altered by improved wellbeing and by factors such as female education and empowerment. As they improve, female fecundity comes down and the population growth rate tends to drop to zero. This is roughly where Europe is today. In other parts of the world, growth rates have recently approached a fecundity of 2 (and hence no population growth): the whole continent of South America is down to an average of 2.3, and so rapidly approaching that equilibrium level. Other parts of the world are still experiencing a high rate of growth.

We started the twentieth century at roughly 1.5 billion human beings. We ended the century, after adding 1 billion every twelve years, at 6 billion. We are now at 6.8 billion. By 2028 we’ll be at 8 billion, and the best current population forecast puts us at 9 billion by mid twenty-first century. That’s the challenge. The 9 billion people are also all aspiring to experience the sort of standard of living enjoyed in western Europe and the United States. So we not only have another 50 per cent to be added to the population as we move forward in time, but we also have increased demand for resources per head.

My suggestion is that this contains the seeds of a whole series of necessary changes. If we use the knowledge of the problem at hand to guide our decisions, we might be able to cope with it. If we don’t, it will lead to a series of potential catastrophes. I am going to suggest that we should mainly focus on a few of these challenges, with this large global population being at the core of our future problems. On the other hand, it must be clear from the start that simple population containment is only a very small part of the solution. Given the dynamics of population growth, and provided you have an increase in female education and empowerment and access to contraceptives, population containment comes without the necessity of direct intervention on reproductive activity.

The challenges I wish to highlight – including fresh water provision, energy and mineral resources, food production and climate change – cannot be approached linearly, as if they were not interrelated. Each one of them is strongly related to the others. In sum, we have to treat this as a complex problem that demands complex answers.

Take the example of water resources. The state of Victoria in Australia is one of the breadbaskets of the country because of increased desertification (after an impressive seven successive years of drought). The area is now witnessing a process of population loss through migration. The farmers are packing their bags, and one-third of the freshwater provision to supply the human population in the state is now provided from desalination. So one might think that there’s a technological solution. Desalination comes through and solves the problem. However, desalination is an energy-intensive process. Hence the former problem of water security becomes one of energy security and supply. What seemed a simple question of providing one resource in a given place turned out to have an impact on a different issue, and on a different scale.

Perhaps one could argue that Australia has lots of coal and can therefore afford to burn coal to produce the desalinated water. But to burn coal means to accelerate climate change, and the latter is exactly what brought us the desertification process. Again, linear solutions do not work well for non-linear problems: a linear solution to one problem might create a feedback on a presently secondary variable of the current problem and eventually reinforce the causes of the main problem we were targeting. We need to be very, very careful as we tackle these problems so that we don’t get into these positive feedback loops, because they are the ones leading to the kind of catastrophe that we should be trying to avoid.

We could say quite a lot about water supplies but the obvious thing is that, as the human population increases, the demand for fresh water increases as well. Yet, with an increasing human population, we increase water contamination. So, given a stable fresh water supply around the planet, decreasing fresh water supply after contamination crosses over with increasing water demand from the augmented population. Where’s the crossover point? About 2040–5: approaching mid century. But that’s a global crossover point based on an average count of water available. Locally, people run out of water much sooner. That is, there will be places in which water supplies will run out much sooner than mid twenty-first century. To put the matter bluntly, the presence of water no longer matches local population dynamics. We will increasingly get high population growth in areas where water supplies are scarce. We will go back to desalination, and the latter, as we have seen, will feed into the causes of our problems.

A further illustration is food production. An increased population with higher standards of living clearly needs more food. A simple solution to that problem is to increase the amount of land you put into food production. If this is not locally possible everywhere, one can also imagine a global market operating to transport the food to areas where people need it. But, of course, shipping food around the world contains the risk of threatening the biodiversity of local ecosystems. If, on the other hand, we want to tackle the problem of food production more directly, we will need to seek different production techniques to implement worldwide. I believe intensive agriculture is needed for the improvement in food production volumes that we require. In turn, if we intensify production to a greater degree, we might be able to set aside land to manage and protect biodiversity. So, technological solutions such as genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are available, although whether they are socially acceptable, of course, is another question.

As we move forward with a planet where there are limited resources available and a rapidly rising demand, there is a clear potential for increased conflict. Of course, the more powerful you are, the more likely you are to secure resources, wherever they may be, for the purposes of your own population. For example, we have been mining in Africa for a long time: we need the mineral resources. Recent developments involve the Chinese appearing in Africa, for many of the same reasons. China doesn’t have platinum – it doesn’t have copper either; and of course it needs all such resources. Potential for conflict, I think, is enormous.

A further issue is climate change. Rising sea levels means less land available and, eventually, the flooding of many coastal cities. As we know, many important and densely populated cities have historically developed along coastlines around the planet. Take the example of Bangladesh, and think about the consequences of flooding there: what would be the impact for countries in neighbouring areas? Wouldn’t flooding provoke massive migrations (both internal and international)? At the end of the day, if massive amounts of people are displaced, they will need to find a new place to stay, seeking higher and more fertile land to occupy.

All of these problems imply that either we leave it to power struggles or we manage the problem, in a more peaceful manner, as we move forward. The message I would like to communicate is fairly simple: a big transition is required in order to tame upcoming conflicts over scarce vital resources. I am going to focus on two of these problems and I will spend most of my time dealing with climate change.

Of the many issues we have briefly highlighted, climate change is by far the biggest problem. One of the main reasons for this is that taming climate change can only come through a global agreement. We might manage other problems locally but, because the atmosphere is a shared resource, we need a global agreement with all major parties on board in order to stop its deterioration. We need not only a solution that is sound scientifically, but also one that is capable of being accepted by all major nations. Climate change represents a paradigmatic case of a global challenge that can only be dealt with through a global consent on right remedial actions.

Here, let me introduce a brief detour: I still have said nothing about health and education. As the planet’s resources are stretched, with growing populations within a globalized economic system, we have learnt that disease travels very fast. Take th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Notes on Contributors
• Editors’ Introductions
• Part 1: THE CHALLENGE OF CLIMATE CHANGE
• Part 2: SOCIAL JUSTICE AND SUSTAINABILITY
• Part 3: WHERE TO FROM HERE?
• Index