Backtracking

The COP28 climate summit is underway in Dubai. Few are hopeful any major breakthrough will be achieved to reverse global warming.

This international effort, after all, is accumulating a long record of failure. Climate activist Greta Thunberg has dismissed this summit as nothing more than “talk, talk, talk.”

COP28 is being held against a most striking backdrop: 2023 will be the hottest year on record. There could be no more emphatic testament of the world’s failure to save itself.

This UN-sponsored climate summit had set a clear goal: to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade over pre-industrial levels. On that single goal, the world is failing. Over the next few years, the planet is expected to heat up as much as 2.8 degrees.

There are consequences to that failure. Severe weather will be even harsher. The ice caps and glaciers will melt at a faster rate. Sea levels will rise, submerging many coastal cities. Small island countries will sink into the sea. Coral reefs will die off. Droughts will produce a global food crisis.

Instead of moving ahead in concert, countries have made uneven progress in cutting carbon emissions. Some, by the UN’s own assessment, have been “backtracking” on their climate commitments.

One organizer for COP28 admits that this year, “we are seeing much lower commitment from countries.” That is not good news.

In the previous climate summits, many countries tended to over-promise and under-deliver. This year, they will likely promise less and deliver even lesser.

A few years ago, the industrial economies, finding it hard to tame their own carbon emissions, committed $100 billion a year to fund mitigation projects elsewhere in the world. That has yet to materialize. With recession looming in the industrial economies, it is unlikely the fund will be amply met anytime soon.

Many poor countries are looking to this climate fund to improve investment inflows into their economies. They clamor for it under the name of “climate justice.” But that has done little to encourage the rich economies to open their purse strings.

The UN has set 2050 as the target for achieving “carbon neutrality” – a condition where as much carbon is taken from the atmosphere as is emitted. There are a few instances where technological innovation succeeded in helping us design settlements that are carbon neutral. But these are rare instance and will not reverse the general trend towards more severe warming.

The UAE, for instance, has designed modern townships that will be carbon neutral. But these are settlements built at incredibly unsustainable costs. At the moment, they are merely showcases for what is possible. In poorer societies, people still burn wood to cook.

The Philippines is setting a pretty good record for climate change resilience. But resilience means we improve on the ability of our settlements to survive severe weather brought about by climate warming. It helps little in curbing global warming itself.

At any rate, the Philippines contributes something like 0.3 percent of global emissions while harvesting the worst effects of severe weather. Any great accomplishment we make will not reverse the global trend.

The main weakness of the climate summits held each year is that, like the UN itself, it has no mechanism for enforcing the goals it set. It relies on voluntary compliance. This means that everything is left to the economic and political disposition of the participating countries.

Anyone who has ever run a large organizational effort knows that without a system for accountability and enforcement, the organization cannot meet its goals. COP, like APEC, does not even have a working organization. It is a summit meeting where speeches are made – and accepted at face value.

Greta Thunberg is correct. COP is all “talk, talk, talk.”

But the problem this summit meeting confronts is real. We are dealing with an existential threat to the planet itself. Yet we do not have the institutions and regulatory capacity to address this most serious of challenges. 

Responding to the challenge of global warming requires some sort of global governance. But the present political arrangement, hinged on the Westphalian concept of “sovereignty,” militates against establishing a governance mechanism to meet our mitigation goals.

Yet we cannot just sit and wait for the rich countries to be generous with funds for mitigation investments. We cannot just sit and hope global warming reverse itself on its own. That will not happen even if countries are unwilling to yield on the absoluteness of their “sovereignty” in order to have a governance mechanism for this global effort.

Tonga, one of the Pacific island countries most threatened by rising sea levels, defied international convention on the time zones because its king did not want to lose a day. For decades, until only recently, this little country stood outside its prescribed dateline. This is the sort of challenge “sovereignty” poses on international convention.

Until we are able to evolve some sort of global governance mechanism for orchestrating all our efforts at reversing global warming, all the climate summits will produce only failure. However, evolving the governance mechanism will probably lag behind the pace of climate change. The problem is bound to overwhelm us.

Humanity does care about climate change. We know we have to change lifestyles to help mitigate it. We know we have to accept penalties such as carbon and plastic taxes from our government to bear on runaway pollution.

But countries are another thing altogether. They recognize the problem but are unwilling to yield on sovereignty to help solve it.