Climate Change and Policies

The land is in a constant state of birth,

Giving life to all who live on Earth.

Our carelessness and fears

Have taken a toll over the years!

The Earth is suffering. Above lines summarize the negative impacts of our actions on the planet and how we are failing to preserve its natural endowment. Melting glaciers, rising sea levels, extreme heat waves, and droughts are just some of the ways in which weather is acting extreme. Climate change is widespread, rapid, and intense than ever before. 2019 was the second warmest year on record and 2020 is likely to follow suit. Recent years also saw record levels of fire activity in U.S. and Arctic, super typhoons and hurricanes, floods in China, and near-record low Arctic Sea ice. An estimated 44-billion-dollar weather disasters had occurred globally in 2020. At a more micro-level, climate change is clearly impacting well-being, livelihood, and everyday decisions such as food, travel, and employment. Needless to say, Climate change is a multi-part, multi-dimensional global issue impacting local science, economics, society, politics, and morality. The damage is already done and it is going to stay for innumerable years to come.

The unfortunate part is that these long-term shifts in temperatures and patters are due to human activities and since 1800s have been the major drivers for causing the Earth to be warming faster than at any point in recorded history in at least the last 2000 years. Contributing factors are power generation by burning fossil fuels, manufacturing, cutting down forests, cattle produced methane, etc., - all activities leading to greenhouse gas emissions, global warming, and ultimately to climate change.

Going any farther with a neglect to arising issues will be destructive and it is important to brace for challenges since even if we stopped emitting all greenhouse gases today, the planet will still take time to respond and future generations will continue to get affected.

To address this emergency, the world must act as One. Acting prudently and decisively each human being can help limit climate change by measures such as saving energy at home; walking, cycling and taking public transport; reducing wastage, and most importantly reusing, repairing, and recycling. But it will take more than individual efforts. Bigger solutions such as reforestation, ecosystem protection, and rewilding present as much as 30% of the opportunity to address the problem. Governments, businesses, and leaders need to increase investment in the cause and engage in climate negotiations.

While there are 5000+ climate policies across 196 countries, there are a few treaties, frameworks, and conventions that stand out and provided opportunities to countries to strengthen the global response to the threat. The historic Paris agreement is a legally binding international treaty adopted by 196 parties at COP21 in Paris in 2015 which covered topics of mitigation, adaptation, and finance and set long-term goals to limit the global temperature increase in this century to 2 degrees Celsius while pursuing efforts to limit the increase even further to 1.5 degrees and review countries’ national climate action plan every 5 years - known as Nationally Determined Contribution, or NDC. Before this in 2015, the Kyoto Protocol established mandatory targets for emissions. In 2019, UN Secretary-General António Guterres convened a Climate Action Summit for all leaders to come with concrete, realistic plans for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 45 per cent over the next decade, and to net zero emissions by 2050. Another framework worth mentioning is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which aims to prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system and led to the establishment of the Adaptation Fund and the Green Climate Fund in recognition of the fact that adaptation and mitigation undertakings are expensive. UNFCC is one of the conventions of the Rio Earth Summit (1992), the largest environmental conference ever held to rethink economic growth, advance social equity and ensure environmental protection. Much credit can be attributed to the Brundtland Report, also called our Common Future (1987), which was produced five years earlier, that introduced the concept of sustainable development and described how it could be achieved. An important agency which is enabling international climate policymaking over years (since 1988) is the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCCC) which was endorsed by UN General Assembly and is tasked to review and recommend scientific, social, and economic impacts of climate change and potential response approaches.

Closer home, in India, there are eight “National Missions” which form the core of the National action plan and are focused on promoting understanding of climate change, adaptation and mitigation, energy efficiency and natural resource conservation. When India had announced this plan in 2008, we were just one of the 10-odd countries in the world to have a consolidated policy instrument to tackle climate issue.

Apart from the above, there are many conventions, frameworks, and integrations that happened in the space recently. Experts say that international agreements and conventions are not enough to prevent the global average temperatures. While solutions are discussed on big platforms, ground reality is very different. There is still widespread denial of climate-change, politics of rich countries to burden the developing nations for reducing industrialization when they most need it for development, lack of capacity and funding, lack of trust in governments, lobbying from fossil-fuel industries, and absence of legally binding penalties are all factors contributing to a dismal performance.

However, the world still needs positive action and impact. Despite many things failing this ambition, climate action is required with much more vigor. There is a need for the will of politicians, countries, industries, investors, and consumers to converge and help build a platform for international cooperation and alignment.

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