Chatham House 15-16
October 2012
The 16th Chatham House Climate Change conference,
this year themed around questions of security, resilience and diplomacy, took
place in a mixed atmosphere of urgency, hope and frustration. It is a striking
fact that global greenhouse gas emissions have remained on a steep upward trajectory
since 1990. Global energy demands are increasing and a growing global
population looks set to intensify these pressures still further. In this
context, there was consensus on the need for drastic action to control emissions
if there is to be any chance of limiting global temperature increase to 2°C above
pre-industrial rates. There was hope of
the promise offered by new technologies such as carbon capture and storage;
hope too of a new determination amongst states to tackle emissions through the
UNFCCC process by 2020, but also a tangible sense of frustration at the further
lost years this timescale implied and a lingering fear that it might already be
too late to make a difference. As one speaker put it, ‘the boat left a while
ago’, but the sheer scale and urgency of the challenge is such that we still cannot
afford to get left behind. 
Rising global temperatures will have a profound impact on the
security of many populations and countries in the world. Certainly, climate
change has the potential to open up new areas of competition and dispute between
state actors, with several presentations making reference to the potential for
geopolitical competition for newly accessible arctic resources. Others
suggested the emergence of novel governance challenges and the inadequacy of
existing international regimes and structures to deal with them. The
consequences of sea level rise for the 200 mile exclusive economic zones which
exist off states’ coastlines is just one example of these new challenges, with
coastal retreat and the submergence of low lying islands threatening to reshape
the geopolitical and geoeconomic contours of maritime sovereignty and the
resource claims (fisheries, oil and gas) which go alongside them. 
Yet the global insecurities that seem likely to be impacted
by climate change are necessarily – and perhaps fundamentally – about much more
than competition between states for resources, or even armed conflict per se. Extreme
weather events have already caused global increases in food prices in 2008 and
2011, exacerbating underlying human insecurities amongst vulnerable populations;
most likely contributing to famine in East Africa and perhaps even to the
events of the Arab Spring. These vulnerabilities seem likely to intensify in
the coming decades and similar challenges seem probable with regard to fresh
water resources and increased migration away from unviable areas as existing
coping mechanisms prove unable to adapt to new circumstances. While such insecurities
may be intensified by the pressures of climate change, the challenges they
induce are ultimately rooted in the social and political context of the
countries in which they unfold. Not all states and political systems (or groups
within these states) will be equally exposed to and able to cope with climate
change-induced insecurities, with the greatest impact likely to fall those
regions and populations which are already most vulnerable and face the greatest
challenges of development and governance.
Indeed, for many speakers, issues of governance were at the
heart of the climate change challenge, both in terms of national and local preparedness,
vulnerabilities and resilience, but also internationally in terms of the steps
required to restrain it. There was consensus that the geopolitical context has
also changed profoundly since the signing of the Kyoto protocol in 1997. Most
significantly, the continuing rapid economic development of the BRIC states
(Brazil, Russia, India and China) and of others such as Indonesia, have not
only intensified the drivers of global emissions through their rapid
industrialisation, but also introduced significant new and influential
interests into global climate governance. The dilemma of how to deliver on the
twin goals economic growth on the one hand and emissions controls on the other has
thus if anything become more complex and contested than in previous years, as
the failed UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen so clearly illustrate.
Even so, a number of presenters warned against making
simplistic distinctions between so-called developed and developing worlds in this
respect. China may now be the largest greenhouse case emitter, but the
interdependence of the global economy means that so much of the manufacturing
activity which drives its industrial growth is itself a response to consumption
in the United States and Europe. While some western countries (such as the UK)
may have been able to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions, in many cases,
this has been a consequence of effectively transferring polluting activity
elsewhere. The UK still consumes plenty of steel for example, but most of this is
now imported from China rather than manufactured indigenously in south Wales. In this spirit, a number of speakers called
for a shift from targets based on greenhouse gas production to targets based on
consumption, a more punitive global carbon pricing scheme on the same basis, the
pressing need for investment both current and future renewable energy
technologies and energy efficiency and the hope that developing countries may
be able to leapfrog the mistakes of the west in their own industrial growth.
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| Tim Edmunds |
Yet throughout the conference, there was a sense of a ghost
at the table. Despite all the political and financial efforts that have been put
into tacking climate change and all the political exhortations to change, consumption
continues to rise, global emissions
continue to increase and firm global commitments to change remain elusive. In
this context, there remains a real question over the extent to which technical
solutions to climate change – rather than more fundamental changes in global
patterns of consumption – will be able to arrest these changes in time to make
a difference. In the absence of more deep-seated
change in the underlying drivers of global emissions and in the face of
continuing structural inertias in the global governance of the climate, an
increase in global temperatures of over 2°C seems to be shifting from possibility to
likelihood, and the consequences of this are both uncertain and potentially
vast in scale. In this context, efforts to mitigate climate change remain more
pressing than ever, but the pressures of more radical adaptation
may soon become overwhelming too.