The Cancún accords

I searched various news websites in vain for the text of what was agreed at Cancún. I eventually found them for download from the UNFCC. The text is dry and technical, but the document on 'Long Term Cooperative Actions' does contain some useful results:

1. Developing countries commit to emissions reductions in principle, to having them verified if they are funded by others and to
2. The funding commitment of $30b by 2012 is reaffirmed with a plea to make it specific and start spending it
3. REDD+ gets the green light, with safeguards to make sure that developing countries are in charge of the process, emissions reductions are verified and indigenous peoples consulted and protected. No doubt we will continue quibbling about the details, but now we can do so on the basis of funded pilot programs and research rather than speculation
4. Adaptation is given higher priority and actions are promised to sort out the funding for it, which in my experience is both slow and insufficient.

There are also some honest admissions: first, that the targets and commitments are still way too low and second that little of the money promised at Copenhagen has materialised so far. Maybe most worrying is that some developed countries now want to abandon even the pathetic commitments they made at Kyoto, which makes the chances of getting another legally binding deal look slim. (Japan? Seriously?)

Overall, a disappointing conclusion to another year of talking while the world warms, but a baby step in the right direction and an impressive achievement by the Mexican hosts to get anything at all. I am more convinced than ever that countries and cities need to move faster and that it is in our economic self-interest, even before the environmental consequences are taken into account, to do so, even if others don't.

Is anyone going to Cancun?

I am not - it's too far for someone who purports to care about climate change and with most of Europe under snow I probably wouldn't make it over anyway.

For anyone who does head to Cancun, though, I would recommend this article in China Daily by Bruce Au and Thomas Hale (disclaimer: Bruce is a friend, but I had nothing to do with the article!). Their point is a an interesting variation on the "let the willing countries and cities get on with it" argument: namely, that there are willing cities and industries in China whom we would do well to engage in whatever global efforts we can, while governments fiddle and the US Congress contemplates the abyss.

Meanwhile, has anyone worked out what North Korea's emissions are?

Could the US overtake Europe on climate change?

I'm beginning to think the US may get its climate change act together sooner than Europe. This op-ed from the NY Times suggests that notwithstanding the poor show at Copenhagen and the cold winter, most Americans believe that climate change is happening and we need to do something about it. Sounds obvious, but a relief to know. Maybe the terrible oil leak in the Gulf, which has blown up the administration's "drill plus energy bill" tactic, could be a force for good in the long run, by reminding everyone what unpleasant stuff oil is.

In Europe, on the other hand, we may be losing it a bit. Especially the British (though I suspect this is mostly because British people enjoy being contrary for the sake of it). Fortunately the EU Commission is now proposing a 30% cut in our emissions irrespective of what the rest of the world does, when originally we only wanted to cut by 20%. Maybe if we can pass that and start acting on it we'll get taken seriously again. In the meantime, we can carry on selling solar technology to the rest of the world. A trip to Germany last weekend reminded me just how mainstream solar has become, if the subsidies are right. See picture above.

Collier versus Lovelock

Two contrasting points of view on climate change and sustainability this week from two very different academics: Paul Collier and James Lovelock.

Last week, Professor Paul Collier spoke at the LSE about his new book: The Plundered Planet. I bought the book, but haven't read it yet. It sounded like a development economist's belated recognition that the earth may have a carrying capacity, that we may be exceeding that carrying capacity and that this may be a problem for future generations. He was careful not to describe himself as an environmentalist - indeed, he was keen to stress that his analysis would upset many environmentalists - but rather as having grasped that unsustainable use of resources is both unfair and inefficient. In effect, by 'plundering' we are stealing both from other people and future generations who have a claim to their benefits.

Collier's insight may seem banal to anyone who has been working on climate change, agriculture or environmental questions - but some of the conclusion bear closer examination. First, natural resources should belong to countries, NOT local residents who are entitled to compensation, but no more. (Good luck explaining that in the Niger delta). Second, sharing the resources with future generations doesn't imply keeping it unchanged, but ensuring that the BENEFIT is shared equally. So if you convert a patch of forest to farmland, that's OK as long as there is an income stream for future generations (and an offsetting emissions reduction somewhere else).

A week later, I saw James Lovelock speak at the Hay-on-Wye book festival. It was less of a presentation, more of a chat: but like Collier, he managed to infuriate the environmentalists by pleading for urgent investment in nuclear power and admitting that we may be too late to stop serious climate change. There is a paradox here. His Gaia theory, which describes the self-equilibrating interaction between the earth's ecosystems and its atmosphere, predicts that life will eventually adjust to climate change, through a combination of adaptation and corrective feedback. So life, in some form, will survive whatever we throw at the system. Our particular species need not, however. Or at least, not in our present number or form. Lovelock can sound blasé when describing a future in which we have all adapted - but he describes something that most of us would find disastrous: namely, a population crash to below one billion, drastic changes to food and lifestyles, no more skiing in winter.

To give both thinkers credit, I suppose I should read their books as well as go to their talks. Meanwhile here is a good review of Lovelock's talk and Hay in general from John Harris in the Guardian and a not so good review of Collier's previous book, the Bottom Billion.

Eight ways the world should be spending its money

The MIT Poverty Action Lab has a fantastically simple, compelling list of seven ways to help achieve the Millennium Development Goals. I'm going to print these and put them in my wallet.

My favourite finding is still that deworming kids in Kenya at 50 cents each adds a year to their schooling. It's widely known in the academic community, but not enough outside it (and are there any case studies outside Kenya?).

My nomination for an eighth high-impact way to spend money is REDD: Reducing Deforestation and Forest Degradation. If done properly this could make a big contribution to carbon emissions cuts and help improve the productivity of smallholder agriculture at the same time. I have high hopes that this will form part of whatever deal emerges at Copenhagen; paradoxically, it may be easier to get it through if the rest of the summit is a flop, because the world will be desperate for some good news (though beware countries who think they can buy their way out of climate change on the cheap. We still has to replace those coal fired power stations with something better) . See here for a new Economist article about it.

What doesn't make the list? Stimulus packages, the war in Afghanistan and bank bail-outs. Personally, I think all three of the above are necessary to avert worse disasters (after all a global economic collapse would also cut the amount we can spend on development) but the ease with which we shovel vast amounts of money down the banks' throats is still staggering.

Climate change in Australia vs healthcare in the US

I’ve spent the last month in Australia, working on the role of forests in combating climate change. It’s hard to avoid noticing that Australia is the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide per head. Relying on coal for power and an energy-intensive lifestyle lead to emissions of 27 tonnes per person per year, higher even than the US. Australians have dragged their feet over climate change for years: they only signed the Kyoto Protocol in 2008 and while Prime Minister Kevin Rudd travels the world drumming up support for ‘global deal’, at home he is struggling to force through Australia’s first ever emissions trading scheme without watering it down to meaninglessness. Large chunks of the Liberal Party are oppose any kind of emissions trading and some of them happily proclaim they “don’t believe” in climate change.

There is a paradox here. Australians are among the most ecologically stressed people in the world. Every year, wild bushfires lay waste to coastal forests, but the fires in Victoria last year were the worst in living memory. The antipodean climate is harsh and unreliable: a decade of drought may be followed by torrential floods as the warm waters of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation wallow back and forth across the Pacific. European invaders cleared swathes of inland forest to make farms and pasture, but much of the thin soil is exhausted and the land has reverted to bush. Even the once-rich agricultural lands of the Murray-Darling basin are being abandoned as there just isn’t enough water to feed the fruits, vines and Adelaide at the same time. So how can any reasonable Australian doubt that climate change is a serious threat to their beautiful country and way of life? After all, most forecasts suggest that a warmer world will exacerbate the fluctuations of their climate even further.

Some of the people who should lose the most from climate change are therefore among its stoutest deniers – while the population of certain European countries, whose idea of a heat wave is a week above 30 degrees, are up in arms. Why this self-defeating short-sightedness? Are the people in the pockets of BHP Billiton?

The healthcare system in the USA is even more perplexing. The strongest opponents of healthcare reform in the US include many who should benefit from it: middle-class white people, whose employee-linked health benefits are more precarious than ever thanks to the recession, mass unemployment and spiralling costs. Almost any American, veterans excepted, risks losing their healthcare if they lose their job. Yet the right spent much of 2009 creating the impression that universal healthcare meant “losing your healthcare” – which is a bit like saying that a programme to end famine will make your family go hungry. I would love to find an unemployed Republican who cannot get insurance her- or himself, but continues to protest against the “government takeover” of healthcare.

Is this behaviour economically explicable? Selfishness does not explain why, in effect, people vote to increase the risk of bushfires or their chances of being undiagnosed with a disease for lack of insurance. Is it short-sightedness, a fear of uncertainty or simply a contrary instinct, one that assumes it is best to the opposite of whatever the government is advising? My current best guess is that it is to do with a long and tangled chain of causation. The link between burning coal in Australia and bush fires is evident, but as long as China opens two new power stations every week, an Australian might be rational in continuing to burn coal, as long as China does. How about Greenpeace stop trying to shut down nuclear power plants and blockade the port of Newcastle, the source of much of China’s coal, instead?

Climate change migrants in Ghana

When you travel north in Ghana, the climate becomes drier and the villages poorer, until you end up in the Upper East and Upper West regions - friendly, slow-moving places, dry for most of the year and becoming more so. In other words, exactly the sorts of places where you would expect climate change-related migration to begin.

Sam Knight in the Financial Times tries to unpick the climate change migration debate. Is climate change migration something entirely new, or merely a continuation of existing trends? It looks like the numbers will be greater than we have been used (the Stern review suggests anything between 200 and 500 million people over the next 50 years), but that doesn't mean that starving farmers from Burkina Faso or Bangladesh will be pitching up in European capitals. More likely, the children of the rural poor will migrate to coastal cities and the educated youth of the capitals will migrate to richer countries, as they do now.

So what can we do about it? Beyond the obvious priority of containing climate change, I can think of two helpful policies:

1. Invest in agriculture in vulnerable areas - whether it's drought-resistant seeds, irrigation, new kinds of crops that reduce soil erosion or thrive in drier (or more volatile) climates
2. Improve transport links between coastal and inland regions: that facilitates seasonal migration, which keeps remote areas alive through remittances and periodic visits. It will also bring down the cost of living and make it easier for people in the arid areas to sell whatever they grow to richer urban consumers

On the other hand, these two are unlikely to work:
1. Trying to restrict migration - through passports, ID cards, quotas, . People will still move, only they will pay more for it and people traffickers will collect the difference
2. Bribing people to stay at home through welfare payments, social services, etc. Investing in health and education in rural areas is a great area, but it's more likely to promote migration than discourage it

Climate-induced migration is nothing new: we've been at it since the Sahara was green. It may be that the last few millennia were the abnormality and human migration patterns will end up looking more like they did before we invented agriculture.

Nicholas Stern on a global deal on climate change

The publication of the Stern review two years ago helped shift the climate change debate from science to economics. Climate change sceptics can no longer argue that global warming is a myth or within natural variation: instead, their argument is that it is too expensive to do anything about it right now. Not exactly "wait and see", more "wait until it's cheaper".

Nicholas (now Lord) Stern addressed some of these issues yesterday in a public lecture at the London School of Economics. His timely message was that the current financial crisis is small compared to the havoc that serious climate change will wreak. What havoc? Many things, but the main effects are "all about water". A 5 degree warming (quite possible by 2100 under a 'business as usual scenario') is in the same order of magnitude as the difference between the middle of the last Ice Age and now. The combined effects of rising sea levels and retreating glaciers could force half the world's population to move. Apparently, India is already building a border fence around Bangladesh.

The main focus of the speech was on what a 'global deal' looks like and how we might get there. Stern suggested six components:

1. To stabilise carbon dioxide concentrations at a reasonably 'safe' level of 500ppm, a 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (compared to 1990 levels) by 2050. This probably means an 80% reduction in developed countries and more in the USA.

2. By 2050, 8 billion of the world's 9 billion people will live in developing countries. So developing countries must lead the deal, because it will be their world. We cannot force them to cut emissions: they should be forcing us to show them how.

3. Markets and carbon trading will be essential to get reductions at the lowest possible cuts. There will be some exceptions at first to bring people on board (steel? aviation?) but we should aim to phase them out.

4. Whatever targets we set for emissions reduction, we need to stop deforestation quickly. There are lots of ancillary benefits to this (flood control, biodiversity) but it will have to be combined with development. "Climate change and development are deeply linked - if we fail on one, we fail on the other".

5. Technology: nothing should be ruled out, including carbon capture and storage (CCS) and nuclear power. This was controversial with the audience at LSE, but Stern held his ground: we need to try everything, fast, to figure out what works.

6. Adaptation: poor countries will be hit first and hardest. We urgently need to work out how to get low-carbon development in an increasingly hostile natural environment.

The rest of the speech concerned how to put together this global deal and the research programme needed to support it (this is a university, after all). "Surely the global financial crisis shows us what happens if we become aware of a serious risk and don't deal with it".

Some of Lord Stern's targets are being adopted by politicians. Barack Obama has spoken of an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050; Gordon Brown has committed the UK to doing the same (though he's trying to wriggle out by excluding aviation - see here). What about the developing world? "Attitudes in China and India have changed a lot in the last 2 years, though there is still justified anger at the hypocrisy of the 'rich countries'."

It seems it always requires a disaster (Katrina? Lehman Brothers?) to shake politicians into action. Sadly, at the current rate we are going to need a few more disasters before the key players, China or the USA, take serious action on climate change.

The Great Illusion: Part One

Paul Krugman has a thought-provoking piece in the New York Times. He compares the international situation now with 1914, when the last great wave of globalization ended and the world turned in on itself for more than a generation.

I am substantially less well informed to comment than Krugman or many others, but it seems to me he is right to highlight the end of Pax Americana (but didn't that end in 2001, if it ever existed?). He is also right to point out how quickly national selfishness and protectionism reared their heads in the food price crisis - with export bans and the like.

There are three crucial differences between 2008 and 1914, however, which make me hopeful that we are not about to see an end to globalization.

The first is that international institutions are enormously stronger now than in 1914. The UN Security Council may have been powerless to do much about Russia and Georgia fighting, but that's because Russia is a member of it. The League of Nations would have issued a nice condemnation, but that institution was useless precisely because the USA, USSR, Germany and Japan were not a partof it. Besides the powerful military and economic bodies, there are countless talking shops where even sworn enemies without diplomatic ties can talk to each other in private, with a mediator if necessary. Europe depends on Russian gas; but Russia depends on Europe's continuing custom: you can't re-route a pipeline.

Second, unlike the Great Depression, the food price crisis contains the seeds of its resolution. 'Crisis' is often taken to mean a disaster, when really it means a turning point: this crisis is also an opportunity, by giving farmers in food-importing countries the incentive they need to grow more food. Here in West Africa, the price of imported rice and cooking oil has gone through the roof; but local food and oil production are starting to rise. Behind the crisis talk on the World Bank's website, a press release celebrates the halving of rice imports in countries as diverse as Guinea, Nigeria and Uganda, thanks to high-yielding rice varieties!

Third, there are large areas of the world that are as stable now as they ever have been. Krugman reminds us that war is now unthinkable in Western Europe; I would argue this extends to all 27 EU member states. The Americas and most of Asia are not islands of stability, they are oceans.

Rather than the end of globalization, I am much more concerned about another great illusion: the idea that we can deal with climate change by burying our heads in the sand. More uninformed ramblings on that to follow . . .