Editor’s Note: Giovana Girardi, a 2014-15 Knight Science Journalism Fellow, is in Lima, Peru, this week with fellow KSJ Fellow Olga Dobrovidova to cover the Lima Climate Change Conference.
In the beginning of this Fellowship, we were invited to make a brief presentation about ourselves, our careers, and what we expected from the program. After a few years reportingon environmental issues, I reached an inevitable conclusion that I shared with my fellow Fellows: climate change is the biggest problem faced by mankind—now and in the future. I came to the Knight Science Journalism program planning to spend at least part of the academic year trying to figure out why—despite all the scientific studies and reports showing the dangerous path mankind is taking—governments haven’t been able, so far, to reach an effective agreement to avoid it.
I guess it was naïve to think that just because we know something, we need to do something. Turns out the world is a bit more complicated than that.
It has been more than 20 years since the world recognized for the first time (during the United Nations Conference Rio-92) the threats of climate change and agreed that it was necessary to avoid it. Every single year since 1995, almost 200 nations have met for two weeks to discuss the problem. As a reporter, in Brazil, I’ve followed a couple of these meetings (the most recent ones), and, to be honest, the parties are really slow to decide something. Even so, the process is quite addictive to follow.
With the current meeting, in Lima, Peru, entering its decisive phase this week, I couldn’t help myself and decided to go there see what might happen this time.
Over and over again. First let’s go back in time. The first decision made in one of this conferences (also called COPs, for Conference of the Parties) occurred only two years after they were initiated: the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the first global agreement to curb emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas that causes global warming. The targets, however, were defined just for industrialized countries.
At that time, such an agreement made sense. In 1997, the division between North and South was much more evident, and the biggest emitters by far were the industrialized countries. However, it soon became clear that wouldn’t be enough. Nowadays, for example, China is the leader in emissions. The challenge now is to reach a new agreement valid for all countries.
Also, the science about climate change has improved a lot since then. The most recent report from IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)—the group of more than 3,000 scientists from all over the world that assesses the knowledge on this subject and provides what is the best science on it—makes it clear that science has never been so sure about climate change and the role of humanity in it.
While IPCC still points to the existence of several uncertainties that need to addressed, it also makes a very strong claim for urgency:
“Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history. Warming of the climate system is unequivocal (…). The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and sea level has risen. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have increased since the pre-industrial era, driven largely by economic and population growth, and are now higher than ever. This has led to atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide that are unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. Their effects, together with those of other anthropogenic drivers, have been detected throughout the climate system and are extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”
For me it has been very frustrating to read this and see no appropriate response.
It’s also surprising to realize that despite the gathering scientific consensus on climate change, what really didn’t change over this period were the basic positions of the parties in the international climate negotiations. The same discourses that guided the first discussions in the early 1990s and ended up shaping the terms of the UN Climate Convention, established in 1992, in Rio de Janeiro, still appear in the current plenaries of the UN climate talks.
In an article written pre-Rio and published in the publication International Affairs, Matthew Paterson and Michael Grubb described the main obstacles to achieving cooperation among countries in order to get a new framework that could lead the world to reduce its greenhouse emissions. Some of them remain relevant, especially those relating to the North-South division: “how the burden of emissions should be shared; the importance of industrialized countries acting first to show their commitment; the relative importance of historical and current emissions; technology transfer and additional financial resource to help developing countries respond”.
Behind these questions was (and still is) a fear about the impact of emissions limits on development. On one hand, developing countries were afraid of having their future economic growth limited by the control of energy use – notably the main source of greenhouse gas emissions. Economic inequity was also important. It didn’t seem fair that developed countries burned all the fossil fuel they wanted in order to grow and get rich, for more than a century, only to ask at that moment for all the world to just start curbing emissions. On the other hand, Northern countries pointed to the “futility” of their efforts if developing countries didn’t act too. Those feelings led to the Kyoto Protocol and continued to block the negotiations until today.
Big, big problem. This retrospective view makes it clear why climate is the biggest unsolved problem of our era. But we can try a more concise answer. For me, at least, it is because climate change connects several economic, social, and environmental issues. Its origins are in industries like energy, transport, and agriculture, and all of these sectors can also be impacted in return by the changes in the climate balance. It has potential to affect biodiversity, food production, and water supply. It can affect health and habitation and even require changes in consumer habits. And all that for the entire planet – even if in different intensities in different places.
There is no easy solution. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions is not as simple as phasing out CFCs, the substances that promote ozone layer depletion – a situation usually compared to climate change because it also required an international agreement to be solved.
What divides populations, however, it is the perception of risk. And that can make all the diference in the way each country will address the problem. I heard something in one of my MIT classes this semester that helped me to understand climate change is so difficult to deal with. Dr. Susan Solomon, who teaches Science, Politics and Environmental Policies, has a theory that for an environmental issue be well addressed, it needs to have the 3Ps: perceivable, personal, and practical.
Climate change is definitely something perceivable and personal for lots of people, especially those that are already suffering from more frequent extreme weather events. But that is not true for everyone. Most Americans nowadays already say that they believe climate change is occurring, but when asked if they feel personally threatened, most say no. So climate change isn’t seen as a practical problem.
Looking for Paris. The calendar of the international negotiations has December of 2015 as the new deadline. The countries established that some decision has to arise next year, in Paris. The hope that is the Lima conference will end with a draft of what will be discussed in France. Some recent events spark hope for the process. In November, the United States and China – countries that for years have symbolized the polarization between developed and developing nations – took an important step by announcing a joint action to control CO2 emissions. Together, the two countries are responsible for 40 percent of current CO2 emissions, and both had been pretty reticent about reducing their emissions if the other didn’t take the first step. That action may inspire other countries to announce own targets and, maybe, help to reach a new global agreement next year. The question that remains is whether the agreement will be as strong as science shows it need to be.
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