Curbing the imminent onslaught of climate change

BY TONY M. MAGHIRANG, Manila Times, Jun 2, 2019

Dire predictions of the severe impacts of global warming beginning year 2030 have elicited varied responses from the international community. A New Yorker piece warns that due to the destruction of their habitat, individual species are going extinct, which could threaten mankind’s very existence over the long haul.

A separate essay on climate change in Forbes advances the more buoyant perspective that climate change could be this generation’s greatest impetus towards innovation and the related drive for game-changing entrepreneurship.

The Philippine Climate Change Commission has started to make a difference in what may be considered the contemporary poster child on the scale of the havoc wrought by climate change. The
Commission is pursuing a proposal entitled “Modelling Locally Driven Water Resilience Through Climate Change Adaptation in Coastal and Small Island Regions in the Haiyan Corridor.” It is also fast-tracking the development of an incentives system for enterprises that generate green jobs.

There’s also the legal action to determine the accountability of 47 cement, coal, oil and gas companies worldwide, whose contribution to climate change allegedly violated the Filipinos’ basic rights to life, water, food and self-determination. Arguably, in this case, the international pursuit of justice is foreshadowed by the country’s victory at the International Criminal Court against China’s intrusion in West Philippine Sea (South China Sea).

Future prospects look bleak. More so when the countdown to extreme global warming by 2030 is ticking.

It would be easy to fall into despair. Time is not exactly on our side and time-honored approaches to environmental protection such as tree planting may not be up to the enormous challenges ahead.

In the search for innovative solutions to reduce the adverse impacts of climate change, the conversation seems to leave out the fact that the world’s population now stands at 7.7 billion plus people.
Each of us could contribute to carbon emissions and add unnecessary wastes on land, sea and air.

On the other hand, everyone could adopt a green habit that curbs his contribution to global warming.

Who knows? Unabated carbon accumulation might lead to a tipping point that could give rise to runaway global warming. That should be enough incentive for every human being to keep his carbon footprint at a minimum.

Governments around the world are doing their share in crafting environment-friendly policies, programs and projects. Their actions follow from expressed national development goals to combat climate change and its impacts as signatories to the Paris Agreement.

Nations meet every five years to measure and assess their accomplishments against their targets. The latest update shows that the world itself is nowhere near on track to avoid the 1.5-degree rise in temperature that’s a precursor to global warming and its grave consequences.

The massively carbon emitting industries, meanwhile, seem to be taking their sweet time to undertake unprecedented initiatives to meet their own sustainability targets including the reduction of their climate change footprint.

There’s a scenario built around the projection that carbon-based fuel would be extremely expensive in the near future. This would compel most industries to realign their demand for energy, for instance, to new unconventional sources that tap technologies, which help reverse rather than escalate the global warming trend.

The forward thinking situation assumes that a cooperative spirit would befall all nations and all of mankind, and the benefits would be equally shared and enjoyed. History has shown, though, that the control of vital resources like energy is a political act. He who owns the gold, in the present case the supply of energy and other vital resources, makes the rules.

That sense of “me-first-against-all-odds” is clearly conveyed by the lackluster participation of some countries in the international cooperation to combat global warming. Whatever happened to “Save Earth, save yourself, save the future?”

There’s the next ten years to figure our way out of this extraordinary mess.