Profit-making cannot occur in an unlivable world
The writer is an academic and researcher. He is also the author of Development, Poverty, and Power in Pakistan, available from Routledge
Despite all the recent attention being given to climate-related challenges, the world is not on track to curb climate changes or to even mitigate against its worst impacts.
The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the foremost international entity which focuses on climate-related problems, has pointed to an increasingly limited timeframe in which to grapple with global warming. The IPCC itself was formed around 35 years ago, and it has since been working to better understand risks associated with climate change, and to identify what needs to be done about this increasingly severe problem.
Every few years, the IPCC releases seminal assessments, in turn consisting of distinct reports prepared by different working groups. The IPCC has recently prepared its sixth climate change assessment with input from 170 experts from 67 countries. The first segment of this assessment deals with physical evidence of ongoing climate change, which was released last year. Two following reports, also part of the same (sixth) IPCC assessment, which identify climate impacts and mitigation measures, have been released during the current year. The findings of these interlinked IPCC reports are alarming. Temperatures on Earth are seen to be reaching a key tipping point, beyond which our planet will become quite an inhospitable place.
The international community has been struggling to deal with climate change for a few decades now. During the climate summit in Paris in 2015, the ‘aspirational’ desire to prevent global warming to rise beyond 1.5 C was agreed upon. Critics at the time rightly pointed out how this global warming target was more a result of political discussions rather than being informed by hard scientific data. Placing faith in the resolve of political leaders to stick to non-binding national plans to harness emissions has proved disappointing.
Last year, world leaders again met at another climate change conference (COP26) and reiterated their pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and to pay more attention to other interlinked problems such as devastating deforestation and investment in highly polluting coal powered energy and other industrial development projects.
However, the UN Secretary General has described the latest IPCC assessment to have revealed “a litany of broken climate promises” by not only governments but big corporations as well. The way that our global economy has placed the profit-making imperative above and beyond the welfare of people and of our planet is exploitative, unethical and very short-sighted.
In recent years, we have seen a groundswell of citizen awareness and activism which is applying some pressure on political and corporate leaders, but not enough to make environmental protection a vote-winning strategy. While there is now a plethora of scientific data and research studies being conducted concerning the varied impacts of climate change, the emergent strategies to deal with this problem remain lopsided. Richer countries are not doing enough to lessen their ecological footprint, or to simultaneously support poorer countries to address the energy needs of their citizenry, without exacerbating climate change.
Despite Covid-19 related slowdowns, CO2 emissions did not slow down enough to alleviate global warming, and now these emissions are again on the rise. While the current situation is dire, it is still not too late to deal with what is now becoming an existential threat for us all. But the time to act is now. Ironically, combating climate change does not need the world to come up with solutions which do not yet exist. The world already has enough knowhow to deal with climate-related risks. What is lacking is the political resolve to override powerful vested interests which remain keener to maximise profits rather than make growth more sustainable and beneficial for a greater number of people.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 20th, 2022.
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