How Can We Tackle the Climate Emergency?
Liam Robinson / July 9 / Climate Crisis
The climate catastrophe is often framed as a problem for the future. General awareness of the current state of the climate emergency and ecological destruction is now high, and the media rightfully reports on the monumental scale of the problem. What’s so often overlooked in the discourse is that this rise in temperature will have disastrous consequences for the Global South. The chief negotiator of the G-77 countries, Lumumba Di-Aping, responded to the 2°C target announcement in 2009, saying “we have been asked to sign a suicide pact”. The long list of disastrous consequences are already affecting poorer countries at an enormously disproportionate rate.
One of the world’s most affected countries is Bangladesh, a country whose people have learned to adapt to extreme weather patterns. But these are now becoming ever more frequent and severe. Only recently, towards the end of May, cyclone Yaas caused widespread destruction across India and Bangladesh. More than 20 villages in Southern Bangladesh were submerged in floods with thousands having to evacuate, with India facing even more severe damage from both cyclone Yaas and cyclone Tauktae in quick succession. High sea temperatures in the Bay of Bengal are a major reason for strong cyclones.
Its low-lying land makes Bangladesh susceptible to coastal flooding as sea levels rise while increasing saltwater intrusion contaminates coastal drinking water supplies and damages agriculture. Inland, whole villages can be destroyed by severe riverbank erosion.
The damages from these changes in the environment can be permanent, leaving families with no choice but to move. Unfortunately, the new reality for most promises severe instability and poverty.
Dhaka
Dhaka, the huge capital city of Bangladesh, has been forged by the country’s intense urbanisation rate. Crucially, extreme inequality is deeply ingrained into its makeup and is putting a strain on its infrastructure. Over 5,000 slums are scattered around the city, often against a backdrop of high-rise buildings and plush development projects. City officials, fixated on this allure of economic “development”, exclude those living in slums from their plans and tend to view them with contempt. The plans to evict an established community of 200,000 people in the Karail informal settlement to make way for a software technology project is one of many examples of such contempt.
Over a thousand people now move to Dhaka every single day and a huge proportion of these are men, women and children seeking refuge. As well as the Rohingya Muslims fleeing from persecution in Myanmar, Dhaka slums have a constant flow of domestic refugees whose homes have been destroyed by the effects of climate change. Forty per cent of the city’s population are now living in slums, with seventy per cent of slum inhabitants moving there because of environmental issues. When you consider the prediction that, by 2050, 13.3 million people in Bangladesh could be forced out of their rural homes due to climate change, the sheer magnitude of the impending consequences become vaguely more comprehensible.
The enormity of the problem to be solved isn’t a reason for hopelessness or apathy. The people of Bangladesh have already made impressive progress in responding to climate change. Take the south-coast city of Mongla, for example, which aims to become the new magnet for climate refugees in the country. The city is being purpose-built to be climate-resilient, including a new loudspeaker system to announce weather changes. As well as climate resilience and urban planning encompasses investment into public services and blue-collar job opportunities, providing an opportunity for prosperity from the unavoidable climate displacement.
This not only helps to illustrate how much the rest of the world can learn from countries that are already experiencing environmental adversity, but it represents just how quickly progress can be made when innovation and collective action is focused on improving human lives.
Global Inequality
The argument that fast-industrialising countries are responsible for the climate emergency is disingenuous. It’s too easy to claim that there’s no use in evolving our economic systems or changing our behaviour while China and India are producing the emissions that they are. The economic growth that countries like Bangladesh are experiencing is vital and unavoidable, not to mention the fact that much of the emissions are a result of outsourcing from multinationals, ultimately consumed by those in western countries.
Considering population size, in 2019 the US still produced over double the CO2 emissions per person than China, and more than 8 times that of India. Then, when historical production emissions and consumption patterns are taken into consideration it’s clear which countries are most responsible. When considering each country’s fair share of global emissions towards the global boundary and how much they overshoot or undershoot this, the Global North (US, Canada, Europe, Israel, Australia, New Zealand and Japan) are responsible for 92% of total national overshoots. The data from this study only extends to 2015, so expect China to be catching up rapidly.
In other words, when considering the impact of historical emissions from production and consumption-based emissions, if every country had produced the same emissions that Bangladesh had relative to their population, there would be no climate emergency. Despite this, they are one of many of the poorer countries that are already suffering its effects. This obviously doesn’t take away from the fact that the likes of China and India need to find a way to reduce their emissions fast, but this shouldn’t be used as a distraction from the accountability that Global North countries need to take.
As the first UN Climate Change Conference since the pandemic approaches, the impact of the climate catastrophe across poorer nations needs to be on the forefront of the agenda. Promises about bouncing back from the pandemic in a way that is in line with solving the climate crisis have veiled the fact that the G7 countries have invested $42 billion more into fossil fuels than into clean energy since the start of the pandemic.
Continually, the focus has been centred on unknown future technologies to solve the climate crisis, while simultaneously allowing the status quo to remain unchallenged. This logic, of putting blind faith into “the free market” to solve all problems, is what has led us to the position we are in now. For the climate catastrophe to be averted, we at least need leaders who have more imagination than one that is limited to returning to the endless cycle of extraction in the name of arbitrary economic growth. But the fact that new ways of thinking are gaining momentum, such as the Doughnut Economics model being applied in Amsterdam, are reasons for hope that change will come in time for Global North countries to sincerely contribute to solving the climate crisis.