Relearning the Climate Change

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