Developing countries will disproportionately suffer the consequences of climate change. Absent a global agreement on climate change, it will almost certainly become more difficult to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, the fundamental framework for global development.
A Global Agenda for a Just and Sustainable Recovery
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Only 1 percent of households in rural Ethiopia have access to electricity. Rema, a village 150 miles north of the capital city of Addis Ababa, is an exception:1 every household—that’s more than 5,500 residents—has electricity. The Solar Energy Foundation, with support from other donors, has installed solar panels on more than 2,000 rooftops.
The project started in 2006 with a $2.7 million grant from the Good Energies Foundation.2 Rema was selected on the basis of its ability to demonstrate the potential of solar power to transform its community of poor families. Since the solar panels were installed, children have been able to do their homework by lamplight and it is possible to store medicines that require refrigeration. A solar-technician training program has been established, and it is able to operate in the evenings thanks to the solar energy generated during the day.
“Normally, an NGO [nongovernmental organization] installs a diesel generator, while the people are responsible for finding fuel,” said Harald Schutzeichel, director and CEO of the Solar Energy Foundation. “However, the villagers of Rema said they didn’t want a technology they can’t pay for, especially since diesel is becoming more and more expensive.”3
Energy is a vital tool for development. The International Energy Agency estimates that around the world, 1.6 billion people lack access to electricity.4 Slightly more than 1 billion people are chronically hungry.5 It is no accident that these numbers are not far apart. Many of the world’s poor fall into both categories. Underdeveloped areas suffer multiple deprivations, and one of the most significant is lack of energy sources.
In a world where technologies make it possible for someone to communicate with another person far away in a split second, the lack of access to a basic commodity like electricity underscores how marginalized some groups of people remain. Energy opens up new economic opportunities for technological advancement and market access. Communities can then build schools and health clinics, diversify their food supply, and attract outside investment. Provided that demand is met by a sustainable supply of energy, everyone stands to gain as energy use increases in poor countries.
Most economists are predicting that oil prices will rise once energy demand returns to its pre-recession levels. The heaviest burden of these rising prices will fall on poor countries that depend on imports to meet their energy needs. The steep rise in food prices in 2008 that led to food riots in 38 countries was at least partially attributable to the spike in fuel prices. Energy, poverty, and hunger are joined together in a tight knot. Unless the world develops new and renewable sources of energy, the entanglement could begin to seem more like a noose.
Climate change is pressuring rich countries to produce cleaner forms of energy. Countries that can afford it are already replacing fossil fuels with solar, wind, and other clean forms of energy. The promise of clean energy is that it could allow all countries to avert the catastrophic effects of climate change that are associated with reliance on fossil fuels. Another promise, less publicized, is that clean energy provides marginalized communities like Rema with a way to spur their own development: they can leapfrog over technological barriers that may have appeared intractable only a short while ago, opening up the possibility of renewed progress toward the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). It will be a major challenge to expand the remarkable progress in Rema as the world is struggling to recover from the worst recession in more than half a century. But it needs to be done in order to reduce poverty and greenhouse gas accumulation and to contain the effects of climate change.
Footnotes
- “Sun energy empowers Ethiopian village” (July 16, 2009), BBC News. [back]
- “Ethiopia powers up with solar energy” (August 8, 2008), Cleantech Group, LLC. [back]
- “Harvesting the Power of the Sun in Rema The Solar Energy Foundation and Good Energies Bring Electicity to Ethiopian Village” (September 12, 2008), Global Energy Network Institute. [back]
- Mr. Tanaka, “Energy Poverty” (2009), The International Energy Agency. [back]
- “1.02 billion people hungry” (June 19, 2009), Food and Agriculture Organization. [back]
Recovery and the Global Economy
The first three chapters of this report describe the U.S. opportunity in this moment of economic turmoil to lay the groundwork for a just and sustainable recovery. But economic recovery in the United States will be neither just nor sustainable if prosperity and economic stability continue to elude the majority of the world’s people. The recession has been yet another reminder that we live in an interconnected world and that this is not going to change.
Climate Change and Global Development
The challenge of climate change will either move the world forward toward a more sustainable future, or drive a wedge between rich and poor and usher in generations of troubled global relations. The emissions legacy of the past, and the unavoidable emissions of the coming years, make it inevitable that climate change will worsen. To avoid the worst outcomes, adaptation—or adjustments that moderate harms—is critically important.
Women and Climate Change
Family nutrition is directly affected by women’s ability to farm. Women farmers grow more than half of all the food in developing countries, and up to 80 percent in parts of Africa, generally in the form of small-scale crops for household consumption. Climate change has already begun to affect agricultural production and, consequently, women’s livelihoods and their ability to support their families’ nutritional needs. Extension efforts need to reach women, who often do not have access to information that would help them make better decisions about how to adapt to climate change.
A Global Agreement on Climate Change
Negotiations taking place in Copenhagen, Denmark in December 2009 will bring together countries from around the world. The Copenhagen conference will focus on formulating a successor to the current treaty on climate change, the Kyoto Protocol. Negotiated in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol went into full force in 2005. It set binding limits on CO2 emissions for some countries; 35 industrialized nations agreed to cut their emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The Kyoto commitment period ends in 2012. What will a post-Kyoto global agreement on climate change look like? This is what the Copenhagen negotiations are supposed to answer, or begin to answer, since the process of finalizing an agreement will culminate in 2012.
Limits on Greenhouse Gas Emissions
One of the main sticking points in the negotiations is agreeing on binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions. Developing countries have consistently maintained that they should not be held to binding limits and will only agree to them if rich countries pledge significant compensation in return. Rich countries, including the United States, have pledged that by 2050 they will reduce their own emissions to 80 percent of 1990 levels, but they balk at the idea of compensation.
Technology Transfer
Cell phones have revolutionized communications in developing countries. In less than a decade, people living in some of the most underdeveloped areas of the world have gone from having no way to communicate outside their villages to being able to talk to almost anyone they wish to speak with. In Fanwargu, Burkina Faso, Natama Alimata calls to find out how many other women in her co-op are planning to use the mill that day and what times are open before she sets out on the 15-mile walk to mill the sorghum her family grows on their small farm.
Funding for Adaptation to Climate Change
Thus far, climate change negotiations have focused almost exclusively on limiting and reducing (“mitigating”) greenhouse gas emissions. It was only in 2007, in its Fourth Assessment Report, that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began to directly address the issue of adaptation, noting that more attention to adaptation is required, and that adaptive capacity is connected to social and economic development. Some of the best adaptation is, in fact, economic growth that provides poor households and poor countries with resources to adjust and cope with change. Adaptation also entails building strong institutions within these countries that can respond to the changing climate, such as agricultural research and extension services, public education, and health care systems.
Special Considerations for Agriculture
Climate change will tax the ability of the world’s farmers to meet the ever-growing demand for food and other agricultural products. These effects will be most strongly felt in the lower latitudes, where the poorest countries are concentrated. By 2020, for example, African farmers in some countries could see their crop yields reduced by as much as 50 percent. Similarly bleak scenarios have been forecast for other regions of the Global South.
The Politics of Climate Change
When developing countries reject internationally-set limits on greenhouse gas emissions, it’s not as though they are taking a “heads in the sand” approach. Many developing countries—Bangladesh or the Maldives, for example—take climate change and its consequences very seriously. Their objections to the limits are largely about fairness; they argue that the countries responsible for greenhouse gas accumulation should bear the bulk of the costs of mitigation.
Trade and Climate Change
Two broadly accepted goals for the world community are: a) the achievement of fair and open trade; and b) clean-energy development to help mitigate climate change. Without trade, much of the socioeconomic development and poverty reduction we have seen around the world in the last two centuries (from the United States and Western Europe to the “East Asian Tigers” and the BRIC nations: Brazil, Russia, India, China) would not have occurred. And without the development of clean-energy, we will not be able to prevent future climate change, and we will not be able to counter the effects of the climate change that is now inevitable.
Making the Connections
Scientists talk about the “feedback loops” that occur as climate change accelerates. Rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases cause warming temperatures that lead to melting glaciers; melting glaciers reduce the Earth’s ability to absorb CO2; the additional CO2 accelerates the warming trend, melting layers of permafrost, beneath which more CO2 is stored and then released. One climate-changing event leads to another, which leads to another, and so on, reinforcing the changes and accelerating their deadly consequences.
A Unified Approach to Adaptation and Development Assistance
As U.S. policymakers grapple with how to address the effects of climate change in poor countries, they may find it tempting to redirect development assistance to cover the costs of helping these countries adapt to climate change. But development assistance and adaptation must not be cast as competitors for the same pool of resources. Adapting to climate change is an additional burden imposed on the developing world, so the means for dealing with that burden should also be additional.
Video: Hunger 2010
