The New Nation - Internet Edition

Christopher Flavin

Re-reading the article I wrote for the November/ December 1988 issue of World Watch was startling- and discouraging.

The article, titled "The Heat Is On," was written just a few months after NASA scientist James Hansen testified before the U.S. Senate, reporting that for the first time there was clear scientific evidence of global warming- and that it was most likely caused by human activity.

I wrote at the time, "Only rarely are public policy turning points so clearly marked. Scientists had accumulated empirical evidence for a phenomenon with the potential to fundamentally alter life on Earth." I devoted much of the remainder of the article to laying out a strategy for dealing with climate change.

Twenty years later, Hansen's testimony still looks like a turning point for climate science, but not the kind of turning point for climate policy that I anticipated. In the years since, there's been a lot of heat-but sadly, not a lot of action.

What happened to the bright hopes of 1988? Optimists at the time pointed to the relatively rapid response to the threat of ozone depletion. In the face of clear scientific evidence of a threat-and with cooperation from the most affected industries- the international community had come together in just a few years to sign an agreement to phase out the worst ozone-damaging chemicals. Climate change is a far larger threat, and as with ozone, scientific evidence pointed to a clear need to act. But the economic scale of the needed transition was vastly larger in the case of climate, and those who felt they would be disadvantaged were quickly mobilized.

A political war over climate change was soon under way, with fossil fuel lobbyists and a handful of "climate skeptics" working hard to convince the public that climate change was not the scientific reality that most scientists had concluded it was. Dr. Hansen, who is a government employee, found his reports edited by a White House lawyer with no scientific credentials but with an impressive employment history-with the oil industry.

Climate legislation was considered by the U.S. Congress soon after Hansen's 1988 testimony, but none of the proposed bills was ever enacted. At the international level, diplomats soon began work on the Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted by world leaders at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. That agreement and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that followed are just now beginning to have an impact on greenhouse gas emissions. And the binding emission limits in the Kyoto Protocol still do not cover the two largest emitters-the United States and China.

European countries have moved forward with extensive climate policies, including an emissions trading system, but the decision by the Bush Administration in 2001 to aggressively oppose both domestic and international climate policy has until recently stymied progress at the global level.

While politicians and diplomats have battled, global emissions of carbon dioxide, the key human-caused greenhouse gas, have risen 40 percent since 1990 and are still headed steeply upward. Two decades have been wasted, and we have not yet addressed one of the gravest problems humanity has ever faced. During the past year, however, the climate issue has unexpectedly reached a second turning point as both the scientific and public consensuses on the need to act have mushroomed.

Compared with 1988, we now have a much better understanding of the potentially catastrophic nature of climate change. The latest science suggests that even small changes in the energy balance of the planet can cause a cascade of secondary changes. There was a time when tropical palms grew at the North Pole and the sea level was 60 meters higher than it is today. But it is not a world we would recognize-or with which we are prepared to cope.

Humanity got to where it is today by being an adaptable species. But we have never confronted a problem whose scope is global and time frame is intergenerational. In his most recent research, Jim Hansen has concluded that in order to avoid catastrophic climate change, the world has a decade at most to turn greenhouse gas emission trends around. And because of the prior two decades of inaction, today's effort will need to be more ambitious-at least a 50 percent cut in global emissions by 2050,with an 80-90 percent reduction in industrial nations.

Those are difficult-some would say Herculean-targets, but the world has advantages today it did not have in 1988. The powerful interaction of innovative policies, advancing technology, and growing investment have led to a pace of change in energy markets unseen since men like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford created the last great energy revolution a century ago.

The European Union has begun regulating greenhouse gas emissions,which it aims to cut 20 percent below the 1990 level by 2020. In the United States, nearly half the states and several hundred cities have enacted strong climate policies. And even China, where emissions are growing the fastest, is enacting a range of policies to improve energy efficiency and introduce clean energy sources.

Of the policy recommendations I made in 1988, I find that many are still relevant-indeed, some are included in one or more of the climate bills now before the U.S.Congress. My fervent hope is that the political and technological evolution that has occurred over these two decades will make such changes easier to implement. And it won't take another two decades to know if the world is up to it.

Paroma Basu

Carbon credits provide incentives for facilities such as this brick factory in Lalgola, India to cut their greenhouse-gas emissions.P. CALINESCU/PANOS India's blooming carbon market has emerged as the hottest destination for companies in the industrialized world seeking to do their bit in the fight against global warming.

But as one of the first nations to move aggressively into carbon trading, India has also been the first to collide with the teething troubles of the fledgling market.

"There is a problem with the process of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) itself that no one has been able to remove," says Chandra Bhushan, associate director of the Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi. "Independent oversight, to ensure that the processes are clean, just isn't there yet."

The CDM was established under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It lets nations buy certified emissions reductions, or 'carbon credits', from countries that earn them by cutting greenhouse-gas emissions.

Several issues lie at the heart of India's troubles with carbon commerce. They include the country's lack of preparedness, the United Nation's inexperience with the market, the technical difficulties of managing, supervising and regulating projects, and delays in the Kyoto Protocol coming into effect.

Despite the early setbacks, observers say that a solid system of checks and balances is now coming into place. "Because India was and currently is the CDM leader, it is natural that the problems were first faced by Indian projects," says José Domingos Miguez, an official in Brazil's Ministry of Science and Technology and a member and former chair of the CDM's executive board, which oversees the mechanism. "This is a learning-by-doing process."

"Independent oversight, to ensure that the processes are clean, just isn't there yet."

India is home to 282 of the world's 803 registered carbon-trading projects, according to the United Nations - more than China (116) and India (108) combined. And analysts say that Indian companies have already earned about US$350 million from these ventures. With another 435 projects in the pipeline, the earnings will quickly run into billions of dollars.

Some claim that the offsetting mechanism is susceptible to easy fraud, but Indian firms counter that they have to jump through several regulatory hoops to gain registration. Under the Marrakech Accords of 2001, which fleshed out the rules for meeting Kyoto targets, projects must clear three stages of review - a process that generally takes about a year to complete.

Once a firm identifies a way to reduce emissions in its business - by switching to wind power, for example - it has to clear its idea with a government task force appointed inside each nation. Then, the projects are audited by UN-accredited 'designated operational entities', which check their methodology, documentation, finances and eligibility. Around six such entities operate in India.

In the third stage, the CDM's executive board, comprising senior climate scientists and officials from around the world, makes the final call. Projects that get the green light can finalize deals with buyers in developed nations. For the rest of the project's duration, UN-appointed auditors visit at regular intervals, awarding credits on the basis of the extent of reductions made.

Delayed take-off Just after Marrakech, Indian companies were among the first to propose eligible projects. But the CDM board, established in 2001, didn't actually start operating properly until the Kyoto Protocol went into force, in February 2005. Even then, Miguez says, it was almost a year before the cash and people were available to monitor projects on the ground adequately.

That meant that scores of Indian firms, which filed more than 100 applications before 2005, moved headlong into the process in the absence of clear guidelines. "Everything was a confusion to begin with," recalls Subhash Rastogi, vice-president for environment, health and safety at the multi-product firm ITC in Kolkata, which moved into the carbon market in 2003 and has since registered seven projects.

Soon, the Indian carbon market began to rack up bad publicity. Questions surfaced about the legitimacy of its projects and the competence of the auditing firms appointed to oversee them. Pressure groups such as the Center for Science and Environment criticized the wrongful approval of undeserving projects.

In particular, a rule agreed at Marrakech allowed for the automatic registration of a project unless at least three board members request to review it within 4-8 weeks. "Some of the projects were going through the automatic mode and getting registered easily," says Rajesh Kumar Sethi, vice-chair of the CDM board and director of the climate-change department in India's Ministry of Environment and Forests. "The CDM secretariat was thinly staffed at the time - but those types of projects are very rare now." The secretariat, based in Bonn, Germany, now has a technical staff of about 100 to support the 20 board members, Sethi says. The board undertook three random spot-checks last year to keep tabs on national performance, Miguez adds, and it has been updating documentation requirements to tighten up the process.

Measure of doubt An obvious problem, however, is the calculation of greenhouse-gas reductions for specific technologies. These calculations require a baseline from which to measure - but that has been tough to establish in several industry sectors, such as aluminium, cement and agriculture. Another issue is the mechanism's crucial 'additionality' requirement, which holds that to be eligible for benefits, a project has to show that it is genuinely reducing emissions by more than it would have done otherwise. "Additionality is subjective," says Sethi. "Somebody may say it's additional while somebody else may say that it's not."

That murkiness is creating situations in which some companies think that their projects have been rejected unfairly. "A certain randomness persists at the level of the executive board," says Suresh Iyer, deputy general manager of JSW Steel in Mumbai, which has won the world's largest credit award for any one project, for fuel-replacement at its steel mills. "There is no forum in which companies can defend their projects directly in front of the board." "The feeling of rejection is worse when you don't know the reason," says a high-level executive at a leading cement company who didn't want to be named. "We applied for two projects with exactly the same methodology. Only one got accepted - although the rejected one is a much stronger case." Of 36 projects that the CDM board has rejected so far, 14 are from India.

"The secretariat is still not resourced adequately, either in numbers or expertise," says Paravastu Rambabu, managing director of Indian operations for the consulting firm Cantor CO2E. He adds that auditing companies face similar capacity constraints.

Furthermore, companies seeking to join the CDM pay the auditors' fees, and that's a conflict of interest, according to critics. Miguez says that such payment arrangements were laid down at Marrakech, but agrees that it would be better if the CDM board paid the auditors itself.

"With every new system, there will be pluses and minuses," notes Iyer. "But as the number of projects grows, and as companies have seen actual money coming in, awareness and confidence in the process is also growing." Comments

Roger Pielke

This paper, written when adaptation was just emerging as an issue, outlines the reasons that increasing the role that adaptation can and should play in climate change policy. Author Pielke argues that, as mitigation cannot stop climate change instantaneously, adaptation is necessary as a complementary response option.

After outlining what he calls "mitigation logic" and demonstrating that mitigation is not sufficient as a response to climate change, Pielke suggests three principles that could guide an increased role for adaptation. First, he sees adaptation as a response portfolio rather than a single response. Second, he argues that adaptation is a shared responsibility that requires a framework of shared governance. Third, adaptation links the needs of today with the expected problems of tomorrow, because it considers those vulnerable to global change today and aims to change existing policies to reduce vulnerability in the future.

Following this seminal article, adaptation gained international attention and importance, for example in the negotiations over the Kyoto Protocol. It is useful for anyone interested in the beginnings of adaptation as a response measure, and the context in which the issue was initially raised.

Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Vulnerability and Adaptation Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) | 2001, is one component of the Third Assessment Report published by the IPCC after a multi-year international effort to assess the science of climate change. This part is concerned with the impacts climate change may have on the globe, and considers factors that influence vulnerability, as well as ways in which countries can adapt to climate change.

The report describes different types of adaptation, including 'autonomous' and 'planned' adaptation, sketches out concepts of response capacity, and then outlines the impacts associated with scenarios of climate change. Chapter 18 is concerned with adaptation in the context of sustainable development, and considers adaptation processes, future adaptation, adaptive capacity, and policy responses.

Written by a collection of researchers, this volume serves as an authoritative and in-depth reference guide to adaptation from an international perspective. It provides an assessment of adaptation as a response to climate change, largely based on scenarios of future change, but also taking current vulnerability into account.

Mainstreaming adaptation to climate change in least developed countries. Given their low levels of capital, human and technological development, the world's least developed countries (LDCs) are particularly vulnerable to climate change. At the same time they are highly likely to be severely affected by natural disasters. This report provides an introduction to the specific difficulties that LDCs face in a climate change context, with particular attention to climate impacts and vulnerability.

The report includes chapters on climate change and LDCs, adaptation and vulnerability to climate change. Particularly comprehensive are the sections on the definition of adaptation, and the role of adaptation in the Framework Convention on Climate Change and its subsequent negotiations.

There are also two case studies that shed light on the details of adaptation in Bangladesh and Mali, highlighting impact studies and projected changes, as well as sectoral responses. The last chapter on 'lessons learned' is essential reading for anyone interested in bringing adaptation into the mainstream of development policy, and its potential future role in climate policy.

Methods and tools to assess climate change impacts and adaptation options. This resource, compiled by the UN Climate Change Secretariat, provides an overview of the international negotiations concerned with adaptation to climate change and the latest developments under the Framework Convention and the Kyoto Protocol. It is part of a larger section of the UNFCCC's website on the core negotiating issues discussed at the Conferences of the Parties to the Convention.

Focusing exclusively on the policy debates of UN-level negotiations, the section provides a background to these negotiations regarding adaptation, and outlines developments that have taken place at each Conference of the Parties. It is updated with recent developments, and includes a comprehensive list of links to adaptation-related UN documents.

While the language is somewhat technical, this policy-orientated site is useful to anyone already somewhat familiar with climate change, who now wishes to become familiar with the UN process. The site also features a 'compendium' of decision tools to evaluate strategies for adaptation, to which individuals can contribute via an online form.

Handbook on methods for climate change impact assessment and adaptation strategies. This handbook is part of UNEP's contribution to the development of guidelines and handbooks for country-based climate change studies, and includes a detailed methodology for impact assessments around adaptation to climate change.

Starting with details of climate change scenarios, socio-economic scenarios and their integration, subsequent chapters are concerned with sectoral analysis of climate change impacts. Chapter 5 provides an overview of the early conceptualisation of adaptation as a response option to climate change, primarily based on impacts scenarios.

This handbook is designed to provide newcomers to the field of climate impact and adaptation assessment with a guide of the available research methods. While it reflects the change in attitude towards adaptation that started in the late 1990s, the handbook is part of an older generation of adaptation thinking that was heavily based on impact scenarios.

Users guidebook for the adaptation policy framework. Most developing countries are in need of guidelines and technical support on developing policy-relevant adaptation options. This guidebook, together with nine technical papers, is designed to provide such an 'adaptation policy framework'. This final draft (which is open for comments until the end of December 2003) is the result of two years of consultation on climate adaptation policy and capacity development.

The policy framework offers a flexible approach to adaptation policy that allows tailoring to the specific needs of a country while aligning policy to sustainable development priorities. New here is that adaptation is orientated towards current climate variability and extremes, rather than future scenarios, and incorporates a methodology for developing adaptation baselines.

This guide outlines how adaptation strategies can be developed step by step, describing various approaches and the tasks involved for each. It offers practical advice on how to incorporate adaptation concerns into national, sectoral, and local development planning, and is useful as a hands-on tool for anyone involved in adaptation policy.

Justice and adaptation to climate change by Jouni Paavola and Neil Adger, Tyndall Centre. The majority of human-induced climate change is the result of activities in developed countries. But it is the developing countries that are burdened - disproportionately - with the negative impacts of climate change. This research paper explores the the concept of 'justice' and how it applies in the context of adapting to climate change.

The authors review different theories of justice, and propose that increased attention to both distributive justice (how impacts are distributed across groups of people) and procedural justice (how and why particular choices of adaptation are made) is required to understand its implications on adaptation. Of particular interest is the section outlining elements relevant to justice within international climate law.

While demanding in language, this paper underscores the importance of justice issues in the climate change debate - an issue that has so far been neglected in the context of adaptation. It offers insights into the complexity of justice and adaptation, highlighting that adaptation presents fundamentally different implications for justice than mitigation of greenhouse gases.

The Bonn Agreement on Climate Change. This background note - prepared by the European Union's climate change website - clearly and comprehensively summarises the agreement adopted at the Sixth Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change held in Bonn in 2001.

This agreement covers core elements for the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol and funding for developing countries - many of which relate to adaptation - as required by the Buenos Aires Plan of Action, agreed by Parties in November 1998.

The article covers the flexible Kyoto mechanisms, carbon sinks (land-use, land-use change and forestry), funding for developing countries, and the compliance system associated with the Kyoto Protocol.

Adapting to climate change in developing countries, UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.

This short article discusses the vulnerability of developing countries to climate change and examines potential mitigation and adaptation strategies, drawing on a series of case studies from Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The article points out that climate change is expected to have a disproportionate effect on poor people living in developing nations because poverty exacerbates, and is exacerbated by, environmental change. These communities' livelihoods are also often dependent on climate-sensitive resources.

Adapting to climate change in these circumstances requires strengthening traditional coping mechanisms with new technology, increasing awareness and education of the potential impacts on everyday lives, improving communication and knowledge transfer between countries, and international support.

Developing countries will also have to consider risk assessment, migration, and security issues, says the article.