China shows way, but planet needs united action

Death and destruction. The world has watched in horror the unprecedented floods that have killed more than 400 people since May 29 in Kerala, the southernmost state of India and left hundreds of thousands marooned and homeless.

For the record, the state suffered its worst-ever flooding in 100 years. It may perhaps take years to rebuild and bring the state back on an even keel.

While some armchair experts sitting in air-conditioned rooms were quick to pick on the local government for what they called a “mishandling” of the crisis, there were others who more philosophically pointed to global warming, climate change and sundry other natural phenomena surrounding us, and warned that it was time for each one of us to take note and take corrective steps.

Note that the floods came at a time when other parts of the world like Japan and South Korea were experiencing extreme heat waves, while there were earthquakes in Indonesia and forest fires in California.

A bit baffling, I thought, and that led me to what Corrado Clini, a negotiator for the Climate Change Convention-Kyoto Protocol and former minister for the environment in Italy, and Arvea Marieni, a strategy and innovation consultant from Germany, had to say on the matter.

Both of them have impressive green credentials and have been actively championing the need for concerted action to tackle climate change. More importantly, both are closely associated with China where they have been working since the ’90s.

Clini is visiting professor at the School of Environment of Tsinghua University, where he recently gave a lecture on the challenge of plastic pollution. They are also actively promoting and developing Ullattil Manranjith sustainable technologies between the European Union and China.

Marieni said that the signs of global warming are all around us and are more complex than climbing temperatures.

She added that the summer of 2018 was a turning point in terms of collective/ global awareness of climate change. The extreme weather conditions did immense damage and were considered to be the trigger for the flooding in my home state of Kerala. In other words, she said, “climate change has entered the supermarket”.

Both Clini and Marieni agreed that policies and additional investments are required to strengthen overall resilience and mitigate the effects of climate anomalies.

“Most of the affected countries and regions are facing difficulties in tackling the challenges and this could trigger instability and conflict, and in turn drive migration from Africa to Europe,” they said.

Though experts have been quick to pin the blame on various sources, Clini and Marieni argued that the global agenda for the economy and geopolitics of climate change rests with governments, international financial institutions, large energy multinationals, and other strategic industrial sectors.

“The road that they follow must be the one traced by the Montreal Protocol on the protection of the ozone layer,” said Marieni.

Short-term electoral deadlines and national “selfishness” should not be allowed to prevail over the need and urgency of multilateral management of the common interest, they added. “Humanity will have very few cards to play if they do not adhere to this.”

Both of them, however, agreed that China has been taking significant steps to address climate change.

The Global Energy Interconnection project announced by President Xi Jinping in 2015 is the first concrete global-scale technological and industrial cooperation proposal aiming to ensure universal access to electricity by 2050 while halving carbon dioxide emissions compared with 1990.

Chinese companies such as Alibaba have already taken the lead by reiterating their efforts to reduce plastic scrap.

The country has already met its 2020 carbon intensity (CO2 emissions/GDP) target three years ahead of schedule and decided to impose a pollution tax on emissions.

Short-term electoral deadlines and national ‘selfishness’ should not be allowed to prevail ...