Climate change: Rich must fund poor nations

FIRST, it looked like the division of the house in the ongoing UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen was clearly between the rich, developed nations and the poor, economically and industrially developing nations together with the poor, rather economically and industrially underdeveloped nations. To simplify the dichotomy:

The rich countries are neither willing to make larger reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions nor willing to accelerate their reductions so that the goal of nearly no emissions is reached before our planet becomes irreversibly doomed. (The doom scenario is based on calculations of the scientists favored by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.)

The poor countries want the rich ones to increase their GHG reduction targets and schedule the reductions faster. They refuse to curb their own emissions according to the targets the rich countries want because this would mean retarding their (the poor nations’) industrial development, economic progress and ability to reach the level of prosperity and global competitiveness enjoyed by the rich.

And the poor nations also want the rich to fund their projects to acquire and develop technology to achieve zero emissions. They make this demand (which President Gloria Arroyo articulated eloquently in the last Asean summit with key developed nations) because they rightly see that the rich and developed countries reached their level of wealth and development by causing much of the ecological harm to our planet.

The harm the industrialization and economic success of the rich countries caused over the past century created the global warming and weather effects that hit the poor countries hardest. These have scant resources to mitigate the severe rains, typhoons, flooding and rising of the sea that devastate their farms and cities (just as Ondoy, Pepeng and Santi recently did to us.) Therefore, the rich countries must make up for their abuse of the planet and endangering the poor countries by funding their climate-change projects.

New division among developing countries

Then, in the past couple of days, however, a new dichotomy has surfaced within the ranks of the developing and poor countries.

China is the perceived—and in effect the self-appointed—leader of the developing countries and the Philippines seems to accept this pecking order. China has been insisting, prior to the opening on Monday of the Copenhagen conference, that (as President Arroyo had also stressed) the developed nations must provide adequate funding to help poorer countries fight climate change and its effects. Chinese officials, the official media of the People’s Republic and of the Chinese Communist Party, have called for “fairness and justice” and for the rich countries to accept the responsibility of helping the poor countries, which contribute so little to global warming, pay for their “transition to cleaner economics.”

“Whether developed nations, as repeatedly promised, can provide short-term financial aid to poor countries, and gradually establish a long-term support mechanism . . . is the key to realizing this fairness and justice,” said an editorial of the state-run Beijing News. And the Communist Party’s People’s Daily ran a commentary, saying: “Developed countries should promise . . . to provide more funding and technical assistance to developing nations, to help them achieve emissions reductions.”

As if to validate the Marxist thesis-antithesis-synthesis description of socio-political progress, in Copenhagen there is now a division within the poor and developing nations’ camp. (The thesis-antithesis-synthesis formulation is wrongly used to describe the thought of Hegel, thus the so-called Hegelian Dialectic. But Hegel never used these terms. Marx and Engels adopted the formulation to elucidate their theory on poverty, society and the political economy.)

As China, the World’s No. 1 GHG emitter, continued to press for more action and aid from rich developed countries, which China again accused of reneging on their promises to cut their emissions and to give financial support to poorer countries to cope with the effects of global warming, Tuvalu, a small Pacific island country, submitted a proposal to have a “legally binding amendment” to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that would demand stricter and more substantial GHG emission reductions not just on the developed countries but also on China, India and the other richer and more successful emerging economies.

Support the Tuvalu proposal

Tuvalu and other Pacific islands fear being submerged by the rising seas when the ice caps melt. The Tuvalu proposals, backed by the poorest countries most vulnerable to climate change, want the major emerging nations to make heavy reductions in their emissions by 2013. China and India (two of the BRIC nations), Saudi Arabia and other rich developing nations, oppose the Tuvalu proposal.

The tiny island states and African countries reject the goal of limiting the rise in global temperatures to 2.0°Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) from pre-industrial levels. This seems to be acceptable to most of the 192 countries in the Copenhagen conference although it was proposed by the world’s richest and most industrialized G-8 nations.

Tuvalu and others want to set a lower temperature rise cap of only 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit). They think this lower increase of heat would give their countries a chance of not being devastated by deep flooding or deadly drought.

Tuvalu’s head delegate, Taukiei Kitara, said on Thursday that the biggest emission constraints would still be on the rich developed countries but there must also be large demands on the rich and most polluting developing economies, foremost of which is China.

Where does the Philippine delegation stand on this controversy in Copenhagen? We tried but failed to get that information up to press time.

The Philippines must support the Tuvalu proposal. Most of our most important cities are extremely vulnerable to high sea rising after all—just like Tuvalu.