Relearning the Climate Change
Climate
change is very much on the agenda these days. Abrupt monsoon rains are causing
floods and wreckage every year. Thousands of people are getting affected,
hundreds other lose their lives; and the people in same number get displaced
due to climate driven natural calamities. Climate change is a tragedy of
commons that is it affects all the countries and regions of the world in same
way and with nearly the same intensity as it affects Pakistan. With no doubts
in mind, climate change does pose an existential threat to the world. And now
is the right time to unlearn the previously held beliefs about climate change
and relearn an entirely radical approach to fight this monster on the horizon.
 |
| Effects of climate change |
For
an average Pakistani, environmental deterioration unfolds because of
continuously growing deforestation in the past few decades. Therefore, to
combat the climate change, an average Pakistani, using his conventional wisdom,
suggests to compensate this deforestation with equal afforestation and
reforestation. In other words, to save the planet, plant as much trees as you
can!
But
can more and more plantation really heal the ailing planet? Scientists and
climate experts stand polarized over this issue today. Many climate experts
believe it is possible to mitigate the effects of CO2 emissions by planting
more and more trees; but doing so might bring the 9 billion people on the verge
of malnourishment and starvation (Since mitigating the effects of CO2 emissions
requires biomass plantation at large scale and converting agricultural land
into biomass plantation would mean less food production and higher chances of
food shortage).
While
the scientists and climate experts around the world do believe that plantation
can help us reduce the increase in temperature by lesser fraction, this belief
is widely dissented by a minority of hardliners among climate experts, who take
the extremes instead. Nadine Unger, for example, who is an assistant professor
of atmospheric chemistry at Yale University, argued in her piece published in The
New York Times, that plantation would worsen the situation more than it would
help us to combat the threat of climate change. In her opinion, we cannot
reverse or even undo the global warming with the help of forestation only. She
pointed out that trees emit reactive volatile gases which, when combined with
fossil fuels from the cars and industries in the environment, form even more
dangerous airborne chemical toxics and are health hazardous for human beings.
Therefore, amid this climate emergency, plants can’t save the planet.
Today
we are living in the decade zero, which means all our emissions in this decade
will actually determine our environmental deterioration in the coming years.
And as the large number of studies have shown the plants’ incompetency to fully
combat the climate change, and also given the climate emergency we are
currently living in, we should not waste any more time to react and address the
main culprit involved in overheating the planet.
Today,
economic activities are considered as the main culprit for environmental
wreckage as opposed to deforestation, which only accounts for 15 percent of the
global greenhouse emissions. Therefore, this calls for our urgent attention to
be paid at reforming the economic system and not asking for planting the trees.
With
the advent of globalization, the patterns of trade and economic activities have
been greatly altered. The maritime transportation for exporting the goods
across the globe has increased by nearly 400 percent over the years; adding
more and more CO2 emissions in the environment.
The
positive relationship between economic activities and environmental degradation
can’t be better seen and measured than in the case of China. China, after its
entry in the World Trade Organization in 2001, has witnessed a breakneck
economic growth. In the years following its entry in the WTO, Chinese ambitions
for economic growth touched the new heights and their indiscriminate burning of
the coal for keeping the light ON in factories made them – as Andreas Malm, a
Swedish historian on coal has rightly pointed out – “chimney of the world”.
Today China stands as the leading polluter of the world. However, China started
very slowly at CO2 emissions in the earlier years, but soon it started to gain
momentum and by 2007, China was responsible for two thirds of the annual
increase in global emissions. Many people believe that such increase in Chinese
emissions was due to the massive infrastructure and development projects. But
much of it is tied with economic activities. In one study conducted from 2002
to 2008, 48 percent of China’s total emission was related to producing goods
for exports.
Free
trade has also heated the planet to greater extent. In the neoliberal era, the
emission growth had witnessed a decline from 4.5 percent annual increases in
the 1960s to just 1 percent a year in the 1990s. But this millennium started
with a dramatic increase in CO2 emissions, a big thanks to free trade. Between
2000 to 2008, the growth rate reached 3.4 percent a year. In 2009, however, due
to financial crisis, the world witnessed a decline in the CO2 emission growth;
but soon in 2010, the emission growth rate reached the record high increase of
5.9 percent a year. Such increasing trends in the growth of CO2 emissions
forced Inter governmental panel on climate change (IPCC), premier body for
advising governments on climate change, to acknowledge the role that economic
activities play in driving the climate change and it highlighted in its fifth
assessment report, “A growing share of total anthropogenic CO2 emissions is
released in the manufacture of products that are traded across international
borders.”
As
the growing consensus of scientists and climate experts shows today that it is
not the deforestation which is driving the climate change but our economic
system which is overheating the planet. Therefore, rather than focusing on the
more obsolete, clichéd, and naïve idea of combating the climate change by more and
more plantation, it has now become much necessary to direct our attention
towards the role that economic activities play in harming the ecosystem.
Remember,
the climate change is a fact and not a fiction. Therefore, if we didn’t stop
the planet from being destroyed, it will ultimately destroy us!
Writer: Alley Haider
Campaign: Dare to Write
