All change on climate change

People pass by a placard at the COP23 UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn. Photo: Reuters
People pass by a placard at the COP23 UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn. Photo: Reuters

A crucial climate change tipping point may have arrived for New Zealand, writes Colin-Campbell Hunt.

Colin-Campbell Hunt
Colin-Campbell Hunt

What just happened? These brave little columns on climate change have been appearing now for about three years. In all that time it has felt a slightly lonely crusade, much supported by people I run into who tell me they read them, and of course our marvellous Otago Daily Times that publishes them.

But in the space of just a couple of months, the profile given to climate change in the media at large has just exploded. (When was the previous time that TV1 did a series - a series - on climate change?) All of a sudden the risks that a changing climate present to our future are being taken seriously and given serious profile. What a transformation from the previous years when it seemed we were hoping  the whole thing would just go away if we didn’t say anything about it or, when necessary, lied about it. I began to wonder if these columns had had their day.

The theory of complex systems that was my doorway into climate change would in fact predict exactly this kind of radical transformation from one state to another. They are called bifurcations; one of my favourite words.

The unfathomable complexity of interdependent elements within the system (in this case the attitudes  we all have to the great existential threat of a changing climate) is subjected to sustained pressure to change, but clings to its former structures for as long as it can. Why? Because all systems need stability to function, societies especially.

But working away beneath the old structures are new little groupings that are responding to the relentless pressure to change. Think of Oil Free Otago, the Coal Action Network, GenZero. The influence of these groups creates a new way of looking at the world that the rest of us gradually come to believe makes sense, all the while still hanging on to the security of our old opinions.

But a point arrives when the new way of looking at the world has greater credibility than the old, when it becomes obvious the stability  society needs will no longer be found in the old ways of doing things. At that (tipping) point there is a rapid transition from the old structure to the new as we all scramble to find our place in the new order.

So perhaps we can record the latter months of 2017 as the time when our attitudes to climate change began their bifurcation from the old to the new, from a clinging to attitudes that accept a big role for carbon in our lives to an insistence that the future must be free of the stuff.

It’s about time.

The world community went through this transition in Paris two years ago, at the 21st "Conference of Parties" of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, where it was agreed that we should do all we can to stop temperatures rising more than 2degC above pre-industrial levels. Two years later, the  COP23 meeting has been taking place in Bonn, Germany over  the last couple of weeks.

Our Mayor, Dave Cull, was there representing New Zealand cities.

The scale and sophistication of the debates in Bonn make it obvious how much work we have to do to catch up. A quick scan of the "side events"  surrounding the main conference proceedings gives some idea of the agendas we have yet to join. There were literally hundreds of them, the Japanese pavilion alone offering more than 40.

There were reports on progress from countries (Portugal, Turkey, Small Island Developing States, the Nordic countries, the EU, Argentina, Brazil and Finland to name a few), and also a session on how to verify the progress  countries are claiming.

There were specialist presentations on urban development, rural development, health, tropical rain forests, the oceans, finance and investment, insurance, entrepreneurship, fuel subsidies and taxation, coal, ethanol, carbon-free technologies, solar power, transitions to low-carbon energy systems, water, international climate agreements, transport, support for developing countries, contributions from non-government institutions and businesses, litigation, food. 

Other side events debated the effect of all these changes on employment, on human rights, and on gender; I guess the latter refers to gender biases in society.

It is no longer just national governments that are thinking and acting on climate change. Though President Trump tells the world he has pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement, the side events at COP23 tell a different story, with presentations from US businesses and state governments on how much they are doing to de-carbonise their activities. The lesson of COP23 for us here at home is that we have a lot of catching up to do.

The lesson for me is that, despite the huge media profile now given to climate change, this column may be useful for a while yet.

- Colin Campbell-Hunt is an emeritus professor at the CSAFE Centre for Sustainability, University of Otago. Each week in this column, one of a panel of writers addresses issues of sustainability.

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