Action on climate change is picking up some momentum, writes Colin Campbell-Hunt.
Where do we start? There has been a slew of good news for the planet since the last Climate for Change column a month ago.
The Paris agreement has been ratified.
Negotiated between 195 countries in December last year, the agreement required ratification by at least 55 countries, making up at least 55% of global greenhouse gas emissions, before it came into force.
This happened on October 5 and parties to the agreement will now become subject to the regime of reporting and international pressure to meet — and surpass — their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions to reducing emissions.
We know that the INDCs offered in Paris will not be enough to keep global warming within 2degC, but the agreement does make nations subject to what will become a rising global tide of opprobrium if they do not do better.
It is interesting to read the order in which countries ratified the Paris agreement.
Quick to sign up were the island nations of Barbados, Fiji, Grenada, the Maldives, Mauritius, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, Samoa, Seychelles and Tuvalu.
These will be the first to feel the effects of rising sea levels.
Some will probably become uninhabitable this century.
The big guns of China, and the United States ratified on September3 and our ratification sneaked in just one day before the 55% of emissions target was reached, when the EU ratified on October 5.
There was a time when New Zealand spoke for and with the nations of the Pacific, on being nuclear free, for example.
That is a status we are apparently losing, or have lost.
On the very next day, October 6, the International Civil Aviation Organisation, an agency of the United Nations, agreed to a plan to offset some of the emissions from passenger and freight aircraft.
Unlike land travel, where electric cars can substitute for carbon-emitting vehicles, aeroplanes have fewer options to directly reduce emissions, so the plan is to commit up to 2% of the industry’s revenues to fund carbon-absorbing forests and other carbon-reducing investments.
So far so good, but curbing aviation emissions will not be easy.
The industry is now responsible for less than 2% of total emissions, but this is forecast to rise to a quarter of the total by 2050 as traffic increases and other sources of emissions wind down.
And the plan agreed to on October 6 will not apply to all of the industry’s emissions, just to increases above the levels reached in 2020.
And it will not fully offset even these, but 80% of them.
When we need to be aiming for zero net emissions by the middle of the century, the airline industry is clearly not yet doing enough; but it is a start.
Then, on October 15, 170 countries signed up to an amendment to the Montreal Protocol that has successfully reduced the emissions of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) since 1987.
The amendment aims to limit emissions of the hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) that replaced CFCs and have (over short periods) 10,000 times more "global warming potential" than carbon dioxide.
It seems this part of the emissions problem was relatively easy to solve: there are readily available alternatives, and HFCs make up a very small percentage of the emissions that will change the planet’s climate, if we let them.
But small steps in the right direction are to be welcomed.
And finally, a conference on climate change and business in Auckland this month heard that there is rising acceptance in the business community that a changing climate will affect the asset values and profitability of some businesses more than others.
The concept of "climate risk" is being added to the lexicon of the well-informed business leader, and judgements on where to invest — and where to divest — are increasingly including an assessment of the damage that will be done to businesses that do not adapt to the radical changes that will come into the world’s economy.
Our own New Zealand Superannuation Fund, manager of $30 billion of assets that will contribute to our financial security in old age, has said it will now assess climate risk in managing its portfolio.
So many good moves in just one month.
Yes it is true that each one of them is not yet enough to assure us of keeping global warming below the target 2degC.
Just last month, a former head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Sir Robert Watson, published his own sobering assessment of the inadequacy of current international commitments.
He points to the power of vested interests that stand to lose a great deal in a transition to a low-carbon world, and their ability to slow the pace of needed change.
He should know. He was fired from his job as head of the IPCC a year after George W. Bush became president in 2001.
The picture that comes to mind for me after this month of good news is of a mountaineer looking back at an avalanche gathering with mounting speed at his back.
He is aware of his danger and is beginning to run, his efforts impeded by the deep snow that surrounds him.
But he now knows what he must do, and will come to employ every effort that he can to escape.
Who do you think will win? The mountaineer, or the avalanche?
- 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.
