6 Trends That Are Transforming the Climate Change Agenda
In March 2018, Helvetas and Nadel organized a panel discussion on climate change and development with Director of the International Center for Climate Change & Development (ICCCAD) Saleemul Huq and Director of Climate and Disaster Risk Reduction Programs at the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) Gernot Laganda.
This discussion inspired us to choose six global trends that are changing the way the world is tackling climate change.
1. Bottom-up action wins against top-down decisions
The voluntary nature of the Paris climate agreement – as opposed to the top-down, legally binding Kyoto Protocol – has boosted the already growing grassroots climate action. “The Paris Agreement is a bottom-up solution. Countries say what they are prepared to do and feel ownership for their actions,” says Saleemul Huq. “Not just governments, but governors, mayors, companies, citizens – everyone can contribute to its implementation.”
There is even an official UN instrument for that: Non-State Actor Zone for Climate Action (NAZCA), a portal where over 12,000 cities, regions, companies, civil society organizations and investors have already registered their climate pledges.
In 2017, Donald Trump decided to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, but the U.S. continued to fulfill pledges made by his predecessor Barack Obama. From “We Are Still In” coalition to California with its cap-and-trade system, U.S. states, cities, businesses, universities and citizens are reducing emissions and cooperating directly on the international level. “What matters is this: the US is on pace to reach the commitment we made under the agreement – and there is nothing Washington can do to stop us,” said former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, recently appointed as UN special envoy for climate action, in an article for the Guardian.
The bottom-up approach to climate action can also be effective in corruption-ridden countries. “The more broken a system is, the more it is advisable to work at the subnational level and with local institutions. Working only through national governments is not always leading to effective adaptation programs. Sometimes more decentralized programs with local authorities work better,” says Gernot Laganda.
2. Attribution science opens possibilities for legal action
The world has known for a while now that anthropogenic climate change increases the number and intensity of extreme weather events. But scientists avoided linking specific disasters to human-induced climate impact. In the past few years, however, extreme event attribution has been one of the fastest growing subfields of climate science. Scientists run simulations with climate models to determine how much the human impact has contributed to a specific event such as a heat wave.
Attribution research is further catalyzing climate change litigation both against business and governments. New York City is suing oil giants BP, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell. In 2015, 21,900 citizens of the Netherlands won a court case against their government, forcing it to cut national greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25% by 2020 (compared to 1990 levels). The Belgians and Americans have initiated similar cases.
Will governments be able to sue each other? This is an open question. After long and exhausting negotiations, the least developed countries managed to include Article 8 (loss and damage) in the Paris agreement. It gives the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage, created earlier, a firmer standing, and is supposed to support vulnerable countries in dealing with climate-induced expenses. However, the article says very clearly that Article 8 “does not involve or provide a basis for any liability of compensation.”
3. Insurance becomes an important adaptation instrument
Insurers have been among the first to warn the society of climate change. They are also the ones who stimulate adaptation: if building a house less resilient to floods leads to higher insurance premiums, the owner might as well opt to invest in a sturdier building. But how can insurance help the least developed countries, where only a small proportion of the population have any insurance at all? And even those who do have it might not be able to afford the premiums, which are expected to grow as natural disasters are becoming more frequent and intense.
Insurance for climate change is one of the hottest topics right now. One of the most prominent initiatives is InsuResilience. Originally launched in 2015 by G7, it has transformed into a bigger InsuResilience Global Partnership for Climate and Disaster Risk Finance and Insurance Solutions, which partners G20 countries with the most vulnerable states (V20). The partnership aims to enable countries to better prepare for disasters and other climate change impacts through risk finance and insurance.
Well-managed climate risk insurance markets can not only benefit the vulnerable communities around the world but also financially stimulate preventive adaptation measures (such as more resilient housing) and even help insurance industry profit from climate risk. “However, it is important to track where the payouts are going,” says Helvetas’ Management Board Member and Co-Head Advisory Services Rupa Mukerji. “There is a risk that such instruments leave out the poor, who have less to lose, thereby exacerbating existing inequalities.”
4. South-to-South knowledge transfer comes to the forefront
“For many years, there has been a lot of investment in capacity building by developed countries. But it was what we call “fly in, fly out” modality of capacity building: experts from developed countries fly in, deliver workshops, and leave,” says Saleemul Huq.
An over-reliance on the “fly in, fly out” North-South technology transfer is not sustainable long-term, and developing countries realized that they needed their own research to build know-how in climate change adaptation and mitigation.
To give an example, for a long time China, today’s leader in the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, relied on the Northern expertise, such as in wind energy. Today, their own innovation and research are on the rise and are exported to other developing countries, thus stimulating South-South technology transfer.
Another example is academic research. The perfect platforms for local capacity building in developing countries are already in place: national universities. That’s why when looking for solutions to Pakistan’s exposure to climate risks, Helvetas opted to support the efforts of the local University of Agriculture Peshawar to establish a Climate Change Center. In another project, researchers and practitioners from China, Nepal and Pakistan came together to jointly understand and develop approaches to dealing with the changing water regimes in the Asian Highlands. The Least Developed Countries Universities Consortium on Climate Change (LUCCC), established on the initiative of Saleemul Huq’s center, brings together scientific institutions in Asia and Africa to foster South-South collaborative networks and enhance their research capacity in climate change.
5. Renewable energy becomes increasingly viable
While Donald Trump’s administration is trying to promote coal, businesses are opting for renewables: not (or not only) because they want to save the environment but rather because it makes more sense from a long-term business perspective. “By 2020, all mainstream renewable power generation technologies can be expected to provide average costs at the lower end of the fossil-fuel cost range. In addition, several solar PV and wind power projects will provide some of the lowest-cost electricity from any source,” said Adnan Z. Amin, director-general of the International Renewable Energy Agency in the introduction to the 2017 Renewable Power Generation Costs report.
As the costs go down and the associated services improve, the co-benefits of climate mitigation may often be comparable to or more significant than its environmental impact. Saleemul Huq spoke of an excellent example of this trend in his interview with Helvetas: in Bangladesh, more than 4,000,000 households now have a solar panel for lighting. An effective business model made the purchase and maintenance of the solar panels economically viable for the provider and the consumers alike, something that was impossible in poor regions in the past. “The monthly cost of repaying the loan is slightly lower than what they previously spent on kerosene,” says Saleemul Huq. The solar panels have not only provided a slightly cheaper source of electricity to the Bangladeshi families, but have also fostered education: the main reason for buying the panels is for children to be able to do homework in the evenings.
“We see a similar trend across much of Africa,” notes Rupa Mukerji. “In Mali, the market for solar panels has developed even in small towns and the expertise to install and maintain them is proving to be an important source of rural employment. Helvetas supports skill building for such vocations. We see solar panels coming in for charging mobile phones and then they replace polluting kerosene lamps for lighting, dramatically improving the air quality in the house and the quality of life for the family.”
6. Adaptation on par with mitigation
Since the Paris agreement, adaptation is catching up with mitigation on the climate change agenda. Now we have a long-term adaptation goal (as we do for mitigation) and cycles of action on adaptation (again the same as we do for mitigation). Even though the agreement did not include a specific financial goal for adaptation, it still highlighted the need for a balanced approach to adaptation and mitigation funding.
As extreme weather events are being more clearly linked to climate change, international organizations are also starting to expand climate adaptation measures in other (non-climate) areas of work such as food security. “Immediate humanitarian needs often outweigh the need for longer-term preventive measures such as climate change adaptation, which doesn’t allow us to break the vicious cycle of hunger and poverty”, said Gernot Laganda at the Helvetas / Nadel event in Zurich. “We should get away from the paradigm of repetitive crisis response and move towards one of more forward-looking risk management.”
