Thursday 28 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on August 30, 2021 - September 5, 2021

It is tragic but not surprising that most people continue with business as usual even after the latest United Nations (UN) climate change report has warned that we have locked in irreversible changes to life on Earth.

Such irrationality is not at all uncommon; various types of self-destructive behaviour can be seen in our apparently normal lives. These can range from addictions that put our well-being at risk to emotional compulsions that may tip over into a mental health crisis.

Typically, everyone except the person concerned is acutely aware that repeating these negative behaviour patterns is a ­recipe for disaster.

What to speak, then, of planetary phenomena like extreme heatwaves and sea level rise that are apparently beyond an individual’s event horizon?

The buzz about the UN’s sixth climate change report makes it unmistakably clear that, for many of the changes that humans are causing to the climate, the point of no return has been reached.

To quote a BBC News summary, the main findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report are that:

•    The past five years have been the hottest on record since 1850;

•    The recent rate of sea level rise has nearly tripled compared with 1901 to 1971;

•    Human influence is very likely the main driver of the global retreat of glaciers since the 1990s and the decrease in Arctic sea-ice; and

•    It is “virtually certain” that hot extremes, including heatwaves, have become more frequent and more intense since the 1950s, while cold events have become less frequent and less severe.

Yet, these observations are not at all new.  In 2014, the US’ Third National Climate Assessment concluded that “many lines of independent evidence demonstrate that the rapid warming of the past half-century is due primarily to human activities”.

Even much earlier, in 2004, a leaked Pentagon report had warned that the threat to global stability posed by climate change vastly eclipses that of terrorism, The Guardian reported, quoting experts who had seen the study.

The IPCC report has been released just three months ahead of the next global climate summit, the 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, to be held in Glasgow in November.

COP26 is seen as a time of reckoning for the international community to deliver on its promise to keep global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels, as agreed upon in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

So far, all the climate polices that are in place are not enough to keep temperatures within the targets that governments agreed upon at that landmark summit.

Pointing this out in a position paper in July, more than 100 developing countries warned that, without decisive action on five key issues, COP26 would be a failure.

The critical issues are for very deep cuts to be made in greenhouse gas emissions; US$100 billion (RM419 billion) in climate finance to be available yearly; at least half of this climate finance to be allocated for ­adaptation to the unfolding effects of climate change; acknowledgment by the rich countries of their responsibility for the loss and damage because of historical emissions; and clear agreement on common time frames for national climate action plans.

Underlying these demands is a deep sense of anxiety among the poorer countries, which make up the global majority, that they would be left to face the climate crisis on their own.

Taking a cue from the international response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the nations of the Global South fear that a failure to deliver adequate support to them in the form of vaccinations and debt relief will send a signal that “they are and will be alone when climate impacts bite harder”.

Keeping this in mind is important for a correct perspective of where climate action is heading and where the gaps lie.

With the UK co-hosting COP26 with Italy, Britain’s response to the climate emergency has come under intense scrutiny from public interest groups, which share rather interesting findings.

In May, Global Witness, a UK-based whistleblower group, said there was reason to be sceptical of its government’s announcements on climate action.

It pointed out that while Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced an ambitious new target of a 78% reduction in carbon emissions by 2035, “the UK remains far off-track in meeting its existing targets for 2025 and 2030”.

Moreover, the group noted various signs that the UK was not quite walking the talk on the climate crisis. These included approving new drillings for oil and gas, exploring a coal option and appointing a climate sceptic as its trade adviser.

UK-based financial institutions were also the single-biggest source of international finance for six of the most harmful agribusiness companies involved in deforestation in Brazil, the Congo Basin and Papua New Guinea, Global Witness said.

Bearing in mind that more than 70% of greenhouse gas emissions produced since 1988 have been traced to just 100 companies, as the Carbon Majors Report revealed in 2017, the question then arises as to whether global climate action efforts are focused on the right priorities.

The fact that the current rate of resource consumption is disastrously unsustainable has been memorably captured by the Global Footprint Network’s analysis that, if people everywhere lived like US citizens did, we would need the resources of five Earths every year.

The harsh truth is that our response to this civilisational crisis will determine whether our species survives. Despite the rhetoric of the most powerful governments and global corporations, however, our fate is sealed unless we wake up in a very short time and change our relationship with the environment.

Indeed, people all over the world have been waking up to the likelihood that we are creating the conditions for our own extinction.

One such person is climate scientist Peter Kalmus, whose awakening to the individual’s role in averting the climate emergency is captured in his book Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution.

As Kalmus has chronicled, the turning point for him occurred when his first child was born, jolting him into seeing the insanity of burning fossil fuels at an accelerating pace.

Beyond individual action, the climate crisis has spurred the growth of intentional communities that focus on sustainable lifestyles. In these settlements, people who want to cooperate in the regeneration of Nature come together to build a new future for the world.

Those who are not ready to overhaul their lives so drastically will look with hope towards the current institutional structures such as the UN’s climate talks for a pathway to sustainability.

In November, when 190 nations meet for COP26, the world will find out whether its stewards have realised the gravity of the decisions in their hands or whether a mass awakening must happen to bring us back from the brink of eco-suicide.


Rash Behari Bhattacharjee is an associate editor at The Edge

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