Global Development

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.