Peccavi and the power to heal

Climate heat has made life miserable for those living in the northern hemisphere –the abode of most developed countries. Not that the developing countries are spared; the difference lies in the wherewithal to bear the climate cost. Developing countries cannot meet the cost without the assistance of the developed countries accused of pumping excessive greenhouse gases into the atmosphere — a process dating back to the 18th-century industrial revolution. The planet is around 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer than before the industrial revolution. The intense heat followed by unpredictable rainfalls, humidity, droughts, cyclones and wildfire is not the kind of weather patterns the dwellers of the land hemisphere are used to having.

Petteri Taalas, the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, called this bizarre emergence of extreme weather “the new normal”. The climate scientists took exception to the term. “When I hear it, I get a bit crazy because it’s not really the new normal,” said Hannah Cloke, a climate scientist and professor at the University of Reading in the UK. “Until we stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere we have no idea what the future looks like.” 
For climate scientists, this is just the beginning, and the future can be worse if appropriate actions are not taken now. 

Michael E Mann, a climate scientist and distinguished professor at the University of Pennsylvania, prefers calling the situation “the new abnormal”. Talking to CNN, he argued, “The new normal wrongly conveys the idea that we have simply arrived in some new climate state and that we simply have to adapt to it. But it is much worse than that. The impacts become worse and worse as fossil fuel burning and warming continue. It is a shifting baseline of ever-more devastating impacts as long as the Earth continues to warm.”

The discussion around climate change revolves around reducing carbon emissions and improving the flow of climate finance. Within these discussions, issues gaining traction range from the accountability of countries failing to meet their commitments made every year at the Conference of Parties and other climate-related summits to the absence of political will and the International Financial Institutions’ pattern of lending climate finance based on debts mostly. 

In the recently concluded summit on the New Global Finance Pact held in France from June 22 to 23, the financial institutions agreed to provide a breathing space to the debt-distressed countries. The question is: Who will monitor and hold them accountable in case of failure? Unless an international legal framework to this effect is developed, the probability of compromises or falling back to square one shall remain high.

Even if a regulatory mechanism is developed, what is the likelihood that the most vulnerable countries, eight out of which are in sub-Saharan Africa, a continent where 576 million people have yet to experience the comfort of electricity, will not deviate from the “right path” in the absence of the rule of law and functioning institutions? Not to mention terrorism that still holds sway in many countries. The problem does not stop at that. According to the IMF’s April 2023 report on “Closing the Gap: Concessional Climate Finance and Sub-Saharan Africa”, the continent has been deprived of a substantial amount from the official development assistant to accommodate climate finance. 

Every country is bathed in scorching sun, from the US to China, India and Japan. The situation is compounded by the EI Nino weather pattern that originates every seven years in the Pacific Ocean and surges the temperature, leading to sizzling heat, droughts and unprecedented rainfalls. According to Friederkko Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, “This is not a new normal. We do not know what the new normal is. The new normal will be what it is once we stop burning fossil fuels … and we are nowhere near doing that.” 

Combing through the hardcore climate change data, one tends to slip in the foreground the normative questions concerning whether. 

Is not an emotional cost also attached to the weather now changing under the influence of climate change? The balmy days are replaced with heat waves. The typical thunderstorms of summer have transformed into catastrophic floods. A usually warm day, July 4 turned into the hottest day in recorded history this year. With spring shrinking, summers becoming a sizzling plate and winters relentless, would not a poet find his relationship with nature severing — making it difficult to find meaning for their loneliness and love for soulmates in drizzles, daffodils and balmy air? 

Is not human dignity also at stake due to climate change? Besides spreading their hands for sustenance, the people in vulnerable countries suffer from health crises, exacerbated poverty, shrinking educational opportunities, denial of food and dismantled infrastructure — sometimes for decades. Some never recover. The 2022 devastating floods in Pakistan turned millionaires into paupers in one night. Of almost 700,000 pregnant women, 70,000 were forced to give birth among strangers and in a shambolic condition. They were not 700,000 women; they were 700,000 women with 700,000 children waiting to be treated as brazenly as their mothers in the relentless water and ensuing diseases and hunger. What about the physically challenged people? How did they fare? What about debt? Vulnerable and less developed countries are usually ranked high in corruption. It is seldom that grants are used judiciously, leave alone debt-ridden loans, the cost of which is paid from the taxpayers' money without passing on the full benefit to them. 

Charles Napier, who had conquered Sindh in 1840, sent a note to the Crown of England after floods obliterated large swathes of land. He wrote: “Today, having seen this beautiful land and its people suffer, inundated under tons of water for weeks, we, the modern dwellers, having failed to develop a reasonable means of flood protection and drainage system given years of experience before us, can only say one word — ‘Peccavi’. In Latin, Peccavi means we are sorry — we have ‘sinned’.” He finished the note saying, “But we have the power to heal too.”

Today the developed countries are experiencing their Peccavi moment. Let us see when they realise that they have the power to heal.