That emerging economies need to be involved in solving the climate crisis is clear. They represent some 50 per cent of CO2 emissions. So, without their contribution, goals for limiting climate change won’t be met.
The question then is can climate change be solved?
“What is climate change? Well, it's the fact that we're putting gases up into the atmosphere that track additional heat that warm the planet, that changes in climate that lead to changes in precipitation, rainfall patterns, so you get more floods in some areas, more droughts in other areas because there's more energy on Earth. When you trap this heat, you're getting more and more intense hurricanes and other extreme events, more bushfires, etc.,” Cameron Hepburn, economics professor at Oxford University, tells the Found In Conversation podcast. His own research shows that the damage caused by climate change will disproportionately fall on emerging market economies.
“Can we solve it?...We get vast amounts of incoming clean energy, effectively free from the sun and the tides and the wind. And so this challenge fundamentally is about using human ingenuity to harness that clean energy, and to reorient and rewire our economies around” this resource. And emerging market economies are frequently blessed with an abundance of sunshine.
For all the challenges in dealing with climate change there are reasons to be hopeful. Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland an an eminent voice on climate change, believes that the outlook is positive for African countries, based on a recent UN report, “as long as developing countries can get the investment and the skills and the training for the clean energy.” However, it will be a challenge to wean them off the fossil fuels that had been so critical to industrialised countries’ development, she tells the Found in Conversation podcast.
Luckily the biggest emerging market economies “increasingly have a strong self-interest in taking action on climate change,” argues Hepburn. And fortunately the costs of clean energy are falling sharply while the incentives to invest in fossil fuels are diminishing – “are you really going to sink your capital into a 40 year-long coal plant [project] that’s going to be out of the money within five years or possibly less?”
But the approach will have to be measured. “You could potentially solve both climate change and wipe out humanity because you’ve undermined biodiversity,” warns Hepburn. The issue is how to “shift the economic system globally and the financial system so that it’s aligned with sustainability,” he adds, “so that rather than capitalism being a force for the destruction of nature, it’s a force for the preservation of nature.”
As the costs of these alternative sources of energy fall and the risk of being caught in expensive fossil fuel assets grows, investment managers will increasingly allocate capital towards environmentally sustainable projects.
We won’t stop emitting fossil fuels for at least 10 years, which means the next challenge is to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere to stabilise the climate. “It’s a complicated problem, but we are making good progress,” Hepburn says.
Climate change is not just an economic issue. “I came late to realising the very real negative impact that the climate crisis is having on human rights,” says Robinson, “rights to food and water, health, education, shelter but also right to life, a right to live in your own country and not have to migrate because of climate pressures.”
“We know that climate change disproportionately and much earlier affects the poorest countries,” she adds. Within that, gender, age and the right to development are all factors that have to be borne in mind. “We’ve formed a women leaders’ network, because we know now that women’s leadership on climate issues is absolutely vital,” Robinson says.
Hepburn adds that while any individual action isn’t going to do anything taken in isolation, these actions are part of a much wider viral moment that can make a difference. Furthermore, though “the concepts of justice are worth fighting for in and of themselves, they're also instrumentally useful to help us to deliver the change that we need from a natural justice point of view….So yes, individual actions do matter.”
“We need collective changes of behaviour in order to move to [a] better world and do it in a hurry, hopefully,” says Robinson. And she argues for three steps: “make it personal, get angry with those who aren't taking the responsibility seriously enough and in particular, imagine this future more locally where you are.”
Hepburn agrees, adding that “the amplification feature is important on all three dimensions. So make it personal, find your voice, share the vision, but make sure that it's projected and as many other people join in as possible, just to maximise the impact of your actions.”
If you would like to hear more from Cameron Hepburn, Mary Robinson and other experts on understanding the modern world, listen to the Found in Conversation Podcast here.
