Jesse Michels
development
Residents in tourism hotspots have had enough. So what’s the answer?
How do you solve a problem like tourism? It employs hundreds of millions of people, buoys entire industries – but can tear apart the very cities that benefit from it, alienating residents and causing irreversible damage to their culture and heritage.
The cruel experiments of Israel’s arms industry
The cruel experiments of Israel’s arms industry | The Electronic Intifada
Round the back of Ramallah’s main hospital lies the house of Iyad Haddad, a 52-year-old human rights investigator. His home office is the shopfront of a decrepit building and at first glance it looks like a bric-a-brac shop. But the objects placed out on the tables are not household trinkets. The surfaces are, in fact, cluttered with spent ammunition, tear gas canisters, sponge bullets and shell casings.
“If we win, then every coastal city in the world wins, every fishing village in the world wins.” Seychelles Ambassador to the UN Ronny Jumeau
2015 is big year for the world. A final draft of the Sustainable Development Goals are due by the time heads of state gather in New York for the UN Summit in September.
Ambassador Ronny Jumeau
Then, six weeks later diplomats gather in Paris for the last best chance at striking a global agreement on climate change. Today we are kicking off a regular series we are calling “Meet a 2015er” that will offer glimpses into the life of the UN officials, NGO people, diplomats and advocates as they help shape the international development and climate change agenda this year.
We kick off this series in with Ronny Jumeau, the Seychelles Ambassador to the United Nations. Jumeau often represents the Association of Small Island States (AOSIS) in climate change negotiations, but wants to emphasize that these are his own views.
So, we’re sitting here in a snow storm in New York and you are headed to equally cold Geneva for the adaptation meeting of the UNFCC. Let’s talk about the climate change SDG. What is your role in all these negotiations?
My job is to explain things in a way that people understand, without the jargon. We need to move past that and look at the people involved in climate change. We can’t just focus on the science or graphs and figures.
How are the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) feeling about the pace and status of the climate SDG and the climate talks leading up to Paris?
There are so many issues [left] unresolved [by the Lima round of talks in December]. Everybody’s frustrated. Well, maybe not everybody but if you want a strong, ambitious agreement in Paris of course you’re frustrated!
It’s unfortunate that the climate change process has reached a stage where we always say…at least it’s better than nothing. That’s a poor judgement. We say, ‘it could have been worse.’ Everything could have been worse! As long as you’re not dead, it could have been worse.
Sounds quite depressing for the fate of the climate SDG and Paris agreement.
[Laughing] Most resilient of us all are the islands. We are certainly the ones who smile the most, it’s our way of coping. Once you know the worst that can happen [it’s not so bad] — it’s when you don’t know that is the worst. We already know the bottom line…our countries will disappear. We just don’t want that narrative to take over.
There are countries that have approached us who say, you do know if the science is right, that even if we cut all emissions tomorrow, sea level will continue rising. That’s one of the problems AOSIS faces, but the moment you start that conversation, then no one has to listen to you anymore.
What does that mean for how you look at parallel SDG negotiations and Paris climate talks?
The more we make climate change a development narrative, the more attention we get. Tackling climate change cannot be seen as a barrier to pulling people out of poverty. I think we’ve kept that divorced too much. Between pulling out of poverty and climate change, I know which ones will ‘win votes’ as a politician: it’s the poverty reduction.
Our first priority is to make sure that we are still around! So for us, the SDGs and climate change action are one in the same.
Every year AOSIS has a luncheon with the Secretary General. The last time we had lunch and the Ambassadors were speaking, I told them a weak climate agreement will ensure that the SDGs will not succeed. For the SIDS, there can be no sustainable development if the SIDS are not around [due to the affects of climate change.] They go hand in hand.
Can you explain that a bit further?
Most SIDS are heavily dependent on tourism and fisheries. How can we in the SIDS plan the sustainable development of our fisheries, if we don’t know what ocean acidification is going to do? And that’s a climate issue. So until we know how the climate is going to affect the oceans, we can’t plan our biggest industry. Same with agriculture.
Another example is the airport in Seychelles which [ according to the data] will need a new runway to be built at a level that is higher than the whole airport is currently. We need the additional runway to increase tourism, but how do you build it without knowing how high the ocean level will rise and when?
The Secretary General gets it. His Cabinet gets it. But politics comes into play.
We’ll continue the SDGs, of course, but…everyone is saying: whatever you say in the SDG on climate must not pre-judge the Paris agreement [without understanding] that the two cannot be divorced.
Is there hope for a more effective climate SDG
I think we’re going to have SDGs that sound strong, but as long as it’s not strong on the financing! They look good, until someone will say ‘by the way, how are we going to pay for all this?’
Is it really about finance?
It’s all about finance. I think the development narrative has more staying power than the climate narrative because development is about the politics of the developing world. It’s more tangible. That’s what people are elected to do; pull people out of poverty, create jobs. The climate part of that is creating ‘green’ jobs.
One of the ways of getting traction for climate is to say you cannot develop without climate action.
It looks like the meeting in Ethiopia [The Conference on Financing For Development to be held in Addis Ababa this July] is everything. I think that meeting is becoming the whole thing, incredibly important. But, I think people will be saying [once they get to Addis], ‘we’re talking about financing for what now?’
If you take development as something separately from climate change, what are we discussing financing exactly – development projects or climate projects? For the SIDS and [Least Developed Countries] they still go hand in hand, especially in financing context.
Is it necessarily a bad thing to be so focused on finance?
When countries like China and U.S. are interested in solar power, its not because of climate change – it’s business and economic development. I’m not going to argue with that though – whatever it takes to get you to the table!
Will the climate SDG and any agreement that comes out of Paris be completely, separately formulated then?
They [SDGs and UNFCCC] will come together but unfortunately after 2015. We’re so focused now on delivering separately the SDGs, post-2015 development agenda, Paris agreement – but they’re all inter-related. I can understand if someone says, ‘look when it comes to climate change, let’s just develop Paris and not complicate it further.
The trouble is on the one hand: delivering it, on the other hand: are we going to deliver something weak and then start talking?
What happens if there is a weak climate SDG and subsequently, a weak deal in Paris? Why should other countries care what happens to the SIDS as a result?
At first we said ‘you can’t wipe out whole countries, ancient cultures, and so on.’ Then we realized, it’s not us vs. them.
If we win, then every coastal city in the world wins, every fishing village in the world wins.
You cannot take a globe and with blue paint, paint out all those little dots because every continental coastline will change too. We would have to redraw every single continent in the entire world. We’re trying now to say: you save us, you’re saving everybody. As long as we stay above water, everybody else does. If you sacrifice us, who’s next? If we go, we won’t go alone. Just because we disappear, at that point we’ll have runaway climate change, it won’t stop with us. More
© Climate change will ‘cost world far more than estimated’
Lord Stern, the world’s most authoritative climate economist, has issued a stark warning that the financial damage caused by global warming will be considerably greater than current models predict.
This makes it more important than ever to take urgent and drastic action to curb climate change by reducing carbon emissions, he argues.
Lord Stern, who wrote a hugely influential review on the financial implications of climate change in 2006, says the economic models that have been used to calculate the fiscal fallout from climate change are woefully inadequate and severely underestimate the scale of the threat.
As a result, even the recent and hugely authoritative series of reports from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are significantly flawed, he said.
“It is extremely important to understand the severe limitations of standard economic models, such as those cited in the IPCC report, which have made assumptions that simply do not reflect current knowledge about climate change and its … impacts on the economy,” said Lord Stern, a professor at the Grantham Institute, a research centre at the London School of Economics.
Professor Stern and his colleague Dr Simon Dietz will today publish the peer-reviewed findings of their research into climate change economic modelling in the The Economic Journal.
Their review is highly critical of established economic models which, among other things, fail to acknowledge the full breadth of climate change’s likely impact on the economy and are predicated on assumptions about global warming’s effect on output that are “without scientific foundation”.
Professor Stern, whose earlier research said it is far cheaper to tackle climate change now than in the future, added: “I hope our paper will prompt … economists to strive for much better models [and] … help policy-makers and the public recognise the immensity of the potential risks of unmanaged climate change.”
“Models that assume catastrophic damages are not possible fail to take account of the magnitude of the issues and the implications of the science,” he said.
Professor Stern and Dr Dietz say their findings strengthen the case for strong cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and imply that, unless this happens, living standards could even start to decline later this century.
For the study, they modified key features of the “dynamic integrated climate-economy” (Dice) model, initially devised by William Nordhaus in the 1990s. The changes take into account the latest scientific findings and some of the uncertainties about the major risks of climate change that are usually omitted.
The standard Dice model has been used in a wide range of economic studies of the potential impacts of climate change, some of which have been cited in the most recent IPCC report which has been released in three parts over the past nine months.
Dr Dietz said: “While this standard economic model has been useful for economists who estimate the potential impacts of climate change, our paper shows some major improvements are needed before it can reflect the extent of the risks indicated by the science.”
Dr Dietz said his aim was to show how a new version of the model could produce a range of results that are much more representative of the science and economics of climate change, taking into account the uncertainties.
“The new version of this standard economic model, for instance, suggests that the risks from climate change are bigger than portrayed by previous economic models and therefore strengthens the case for strong cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases,” he said.
The new model differs in that it considers a wider temperature range when estimating the impact of doubling the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases – a measure of “climate sensitivity”.
Whereas the standard model usually assumes a single temperature for climate sensitivity of about 3C, the new model uses a range of 1.5C to 6C, which the authors say more accurately reflects the scientific consensus.
The standard model also “implausibly” suggests a loss of global output of 50 per cent would only result after a rise in global average temperature of 18C, even though such warming would likely render the Earth uninhabitable for most species, including humans, Dr Dietz contends.
The new model includes the possibility that such damage could occur at much lower levels of global warming. Standard economic models rule out the possibility that global warming of 5-6C above pre-industrial levels could cause catastrophic damages, even though such temperatures have not occurred on Earth for tens of millions of years. Such an assertion, he says, is without scientific foundation and embodies a false assumption that the risks are known, with great confidence, to be small.
The new model also takes into account that climate change can damage not just economic output, but productivity. The standard model assumes that rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere only affect economic growth in a very limited way, according to Dr Dietz. More
Permaculture Design Certification Course for International Development & Social Entrepreneurship
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Democracy & Good Governance 