Green path is the only way to the future

The massive destruction caused by climate change to the natural world notwithstanding, planet Earth never ceases to surprise us with its secrets. The latest is the discovery of a new reef measuring about 500 meters in height and about 1.5-kilometer wide at the base in Australia's Great Barrier Reef, making it taller than some of the world's highest skyscrapers, including the Empire State Building (381 meters) in New York City and the Petronas Tower (451.9 meters) in Kuala Lumpur.

Researchers found the detached reef, the first to be discovered in more than 120 years, in the waters off northern Queensland during an expedition aboard research vessel Falkor, the Schmidt Ocean Institute said on Monday, although the reef was first discovered on Oct 20.

This is a comforting piece of news given that scientists estimate the Great Barrier Reef has lost up to 50 percent of its coral populations in the last three decades, mainly because of climate change, leaving the future of the more than 1,500 fish species, 411 species of hard corals and dozens of other species that it is home to at the whims of humans, who seem least concerned about the future of even their progenies.

Coinciding with this heartening discovery, however, comes the disturbing news from India that unseasonal heavy snowfalls due to climate change in the Himalayas are forcing the ever elusive snow leopard to descend to lower altitudes.

Nothing alarming about that, except that in search of prey, which too move to lower altitudes, below the snowline, to escape the sudden, drastic drop in temperatures, the snow leopards could come in contact with common leopards that are moving up the slopes due, again, to climate change. Similar reports have been coming out of northern Pakistan, too. Since the two species prey on similar types of ungulates, they could encounter each other leading to fierce fights, a possibility that has left environmentalists and wildlife experts aghast.

This is particularly worrisome because, even though snow leopards have a huge range from China, India, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, Mongolia and Russia, their number is small－between 3,500 and 7,000, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature has classified them as "vulnerable".

For some years now, environmentalists have been dreading that the melting glaciers and ice sheets in the Arctic could drive polar bears into brown and black bear territories, resulting in unforeseen consequences. And yet such catastrophic encounters could become a reality between the two predators, which despite belonging to the same family and genus, have existed as distinct species for tens of thousands of years.

Climate change is a sad reality which many people still refuse to accept. Not to mention some global leaders who, not satisfied with refusing to acknowledge climate change as a threat to humankind, excel in ridiculing countries that have been fighting it.

That is what makes the efforts of countries like China which have been combating climate change all the more important. It is a degree of China's commitment to fighting climate change that it has pledged to build an "ecological civilization". And China has chosen the path of green development, which will promote harmony between humans and nature, to build an ecological civilization, and thus contribute to the global fight against the changing climate.

That the communiqué issued after the conclusion of the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th Communist Party of China Central Committee on Thursday has vowed to move forward on the green development path should come as encouraging news to the global economy, too, because by mitigating the effects of climate change, China will also reduce countries' sovereign risks, which can arise due to the direct and indirect impacts of climate change on public finance.

As a recent Asian Development Bank blog post says, climate change raises the cost of capital in climate-vulnerable countries and threatens debt sustainability. Giving policy recommendations on how to manage climate-related sovereign risk, a recent report, "Climate Change and Sovereign Risk", suggests that financial authorities integrate climate change into their risk management process and governments prioritize climate vulnerability assessments and work with the financial sector to increase investment in climate adaptation.

Climate change can raise sovereign risks and weaken a sovereign's standing, because climate change-induced natural disasters can have a devastating impact on natural capital, and mitigation and adaptation policies could have far-reaching fiscal consequences, even destabilizing the financial sector, which in turn can affect international trade and capital flows.

This shows that by fighting climate change, policymakers and business leaders can not only protect wildlife and the natural environment but also safeguard their finances, in pursuit of which they have been neglecting the natural world for years at their own peril.

The author is a senior editor with China Daily.