Lack of political will and true multilateralism threaten to cripple climate goals
IT WAS a dire prediction: The world is unlikely to achieve its target of keeping global warming to levels needed to prevent an escalating climate crisis, amid the current absence of political will, personal commitment and accountability.
These were the views of some of the participants in the keynote panel of the first day of the World Ocean Summit Asia-Pacific, held in Singapore and organised by Economist Impact.
“We are in a perilous state, and our chances of achieving 1.5 (degrees Celsius target) are very, very small,” said Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, Singapore’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and a panellist.
He was referring to the Paris Agreement of 2015 – in which he had represented Singapore in negotiations – where countries agreed to limit global warming to between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels, by cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions until they reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
“If I were to wind back to Paris, a key breakthrough which occurred was that I saw with my own eyes the United States and China having consensus and making common cause – and, once that was obvious, it became so much easier to get the rest of the room on board,” he said.
But, the minister added, the world is currently in a geostrategic crisis because there is a lack of strategic trust. “Without the two biggest emitters making common cause, it is well-nigh impossible for the rest of the world to say, ‘Well, we can solve it.’”
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“Now, of course, we believe in multilateralism, it’s not just the two of them. But, there is the point in the Kindleberger Trap – basically, if a superpower or superpowers of the time do not underwrite and structure the global strategic architecture to look after the global commons, we end up with a crisis.”
Contributing to the issue is the extractive economic model, which depends heavily on the harvesting or extraction of natural resources. “We need to get out of purely extractive economics to one which is sustainable,” he said.
Lee Hoesung, chair of the United Nations’ (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a panellist, agreed. He said that science has shown that the 1.5 degrees Celsius target is achievable, and now politics and economics have to play their part.
“I think that 1.5 degrees Celsius should be made available for all of us, with an increase in income and living standards,” Lee said. “What (is an issue) is the lack of political will, and also a certain lack of personal motivation.”
Crucial to bolstering political will and personal commitment would be to push for the cost of externalities to be factored into decisions and outcomes, and for these efforts to be transparent.
“The key point for both climate change and oceans is costing externalities. So long as we do not allocate cost of externalities to the producers and traders involved in the supply chains, we’re not going to get this right,” Minister Balakrishnan said.
Peter Thomson, the UN Secretary-General’s special envoy for the ocean and another panellist, agreed, saying that, for him, it means “costing-in nature into all your calculations, whether you’re a government or a corporation”.
Lee said there has been no measure of accountability in using services provided by the ocean. “In other words, our wealth, our development depended upon using natural capital without paying for the services of natural capital. That has to change.”
As for transparency, the minister suggested there is a need for every government to report on what it is doing or not doing. “What we put out into the atmosphere, or what we push into the oceans, needs to be visible; and we need our feet to be held to the coals.”
The need to price externalities was also discussed in a later panel. In that, moderator Simon Baptist, chief economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit, brought up the need to price externalities related to the ocean, perhaps similarly to how carbon taxes are used for land concerns.
“Maybe, for oceans, we need to somehow price plastic waste or establish formalised fishing rights or property rights over the ocean – that’s one thing governments could do. The other thing is to take on some risk-sharing role. Both these activities might mobilise more private capital,” he said.
Allinnettes Go Adigue, head of Asean region hub at the Global Reporting Index and a panellist, said it would not be enough to have just one or two measures. “Just as it takes a basket of solutions to achieve net zero, in the same way, when it comes to managing plastic, you should have innovation and technology, have producers take responsibility, and also have a plastic credit exchange for much smaller companies.”
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