To folks who are keen on saving our planet, which is hurtling towards disaster, I have this to say: there is only more bad news to come. The younger generation, obviously, has a greater stake in what is happening and how we can stop it from taking place.
As we know by now, the world is getting warmer. Those who regularly read this column are well sensitised to the dangers of global warming.
At Paris, in December 2015, 194 countries made some commitments, called ‘nationally determined contributions’, towards slowing down global warming. Even then, many observers knew that these countries could not keep all the promises. As it turns out, even in the unlikely event they did, the planet would warm more than what scientists consider safe. That safety limit is 2 degrees above the global mean surface temperatures that existed between 1850 and 1900 — a period considered a proxy for the “pre-industrialised era”.
The United Nations Environment Programme, in its annual Emission Gap Reports, has repeatedly said that the commitments of countries do not together add up to what is the minimum necessary action. This has been covered well in my previous articles.
And now, more bad news.
Ineffective movement
Far from trying to do what is necessary, many key players are moving in the opposite direction. Here, briefly, is what is happening.
According to a report by the International Energy Agency, of the 35 areas it analysed for effective climate action, just four are doing what they are supposed to do: solar PV, LED lighting, electric vehicles, and powering data centres with renewable energy. The other areas — all sources of renewable energy including wind, geothermal and biomass; making buildings energy efficient and using materials that consume less energy to manufacture; building smart grids; energy storage — are way off-track in their working towards climate action.
No wonder, after remaining flat for three years, the world’s carbon dioxide emissions rose 1.4 per cent in 2017.
Waning funds
Flow of finance to climate action projects is thinning. There are two funds that are symbolic of funding for climate action — the Global Environment Facility (GEF), set up in 1992 to finance environment projects in developing countries, and the Green Climate Fund (GCF), established in 2010 to fund climate action projects, again, in developing countries. The developed countries are expected to be donors for these funds, and their interest is waning. The GEF got $4.1 billion, $300 million less than last time, for the current round of funding (2018-2022). The GCF is unable to get its act together to decide the modalities of the second round of funding — a recent board meeting collapsed on this point and Executive Director Howard Bamsey resigned on “personal grounds”.
The Trump administration wants to support coal and has pared funding to climate finance streams. This, too, is a disaster in the making and we are going to see more storms, droughts, floods and vector-borne diseases across the world, with the developing countries — India in particular — being more vulnerable.
Tree cover loss
There is more bad news — the world’s forests are disappearing, and fast.
Recently, an organisation called Global Forest Watch released a report based on data provided by the University of Maryland. It said that 2017 was the second-worst on record for tropical tree cover loss. The tropics (or the landmass that lies between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn) lost 15.8 million hectares of tree cover in 2017 — an area as big as Bangladesh. An expert has put it graphically thus: equivalent of losing 40 football fields of trees every minute for the entire year.
The planet suffered the highest tree loss two years ago. In 2016 and 2017, we lost forest tree cover of an area as big as Vietnam!
This poses a very big problem to climate change combating efforts as forests are the planet’s lungs, and they absorb carbon dioxide from the air. They play a major role as carbon sinks and, without this, carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere, causing global warming.
Of the top offending countries, four (Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia and Paraguay, in that order) are in South America and four (Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, Mozambique and Ivory Coast) are in Africa. Indonesia and Malaysia make up the top 10 offenders.
Forests are either cleared for coal mining or agriculture. Indonesia has tasted success in exporting coal in the last decade and wants to earn more through this. The country plans to chop 6.3 million hectares of forests to make way for a railway line and a coal mine, in the Kalimantan region.
Grim reality
Folks, all of this is very scary. Nature is vindictive, it will take revenge. As the climate changes and the planet warms, we shall have regular visitations from disasters.
I’m reminded of a limerick in Tamil which roughly translates to: A monk in Nandavanam prayed to god for a beautiful pot, and when he got it, he (overjoyed) danced all over the place holding it, and eventually dropped it and broke it.
We have such a beautiful world and we are destroying it.