Much ado about nothing: Climate science vs policy

The Hindu Business Line , Thursday, October 24, 2013
Correspondent : Dhanasree Jayaram
The lack of scientific certainty should be no reason to postpone cost-effective measures to prevent climate change.

The international community has been caught in the quagmire of the veracity and accuracy of climate science since the 1980s. It has put many other ‘burning’ environmental issues that threaten international security on the backburner.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report 2013 has reiterated that the human contribution to climate change is “extremely likely”. Didn’t we know this already? We also know that the climate system is too complex for scientists to estimate precisely the climate sensitivity problem, that is, how much the system will warm in the future or how regional rainfall patterns will shift or Arctic sea ice or storms will change.

The world needs to step into the “precautionary” mode. Environmental or related crises are killing more people than conventional forms of conflict.

One of the factors that added fuel to the Arab Spring in West Asia was a hike in wheat prices triggered by a ban on wheat exports by Russia as a result of drop in the Russian grain harvest due to a severe heat wave that may or may not have been caused by climate change. Nearly 10,000 people (varying figures) are reported to have been killed in recent flooding in Uttarakhand, which again may or may not be caused by climate change. Do we wait to figure out the climate system completely, which sounds like a distant dream, or do we start acting on the very uncertainties of this climate system that threaten our security?

Climate science is only one requisite for a policy. The entire climate change negotiations cannot bank on assessment reports of the IPCC to decide whether there is a need for an international agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Priorities

The lack of scientific certainty should not be a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental change. The reality is that it is not the lack of scientific knowledge on the issue, rather that of ‘political will’ that has derailed climate policies. The politics of climate change cannot be resolved by upgrading the level of certainty of human influence on the climate system.

The need of the hour is to integrate science with interests and values of nation states and communities that are integral to the international system. We need to take into account existence of complex interconnections between environment, economics and society. When it comes to economics, externalities should also form a part of the cost-benefit analysis. We need to equity and fairness in terms of financial and technological resources at the international level.

Questions such as whether environmental degradation is a symptom or a problem need to be addressed. If it is the symptom, what is the problem? Could it be our consumerist culture? Could it be global governance failure caused by unfair terms of trade or the lack of leadership? If these are the problems, they should be dealt with first ideally.

India needs to step up its indigenous research as well as focus on strategies related to adaptation, energy and development at the national level.

The writer is a Ph.D. candidate with the Department of Geopolitics and International Relations at Manipal University.

(This article was published on October 23, 2013)

 
SOURCE : http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/on-campus/much-ado-about-nothing-climate-science-vs-policy/article5265294.ece
 


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