Onus on developed world to fight climate change

The ongoing United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, has been billed as a global effort to adapt to climate change.

Global response is the only way to fight climate change, as it requires optimal allocation of global resources. Globalization of trade, too, is an optimal allocation of global resources, but with mainly economic interests. Fighting climate change is mainly about responsibility and contribution, so it needs global dialogue and cooperation.

Indeed, the international community has no choice but to take concerted action, including reducing greenhouse gas emissions and following a low-carbon development path. Otherwise, climate change could have a more devastating effect on international trade and commerce, which facilitate economic development, benefiting producers and consumers, and improving people's livelihoods worldwide.

But the cost of reducing greenhouse gas, including carbon dioxide, emissions remains the biggest challenge for the world. Many countries, especially the developing ones, want to address climate change, but to do so they need funds, technologies and cooperation from other countries.

As such, de-globalization and trade wars are the biggest threat to the global fight against climate change, as they undermine communication and cooperation among countries.

Since many countries have not fixed a timeline for peaking their carbon emissions or achieving carbon neutrality, or made National Determined Contributions to global climate action under the Paris Agreement according to their actual capacity, many say the Glasgow conference is perhaps the last chance for countries to come together to combat climate change.

The UN climate conference's aim is to meet the Paris Agreement goals, including limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, preferably to 1.5 C, compared to the pre-industrial levels. But many analysts and climate activists are pessimistic about the success of the Glasgow conference, because they don't believe an agreement would be reached to achieve those goals.

In fact, Alok Sharma, who was appointed president of the UN climate conference by the British government, has said:"This is definitely harder than Paris on lots of levels." And given the differences and varied interests of the 197 countries, it's not easy for them to reach a consensus on climate actions.

Yet on this year's agenda are two key issues－"how do different countries fulfill their different carbon-cutting commitments" and "how can developed countries scale up financial and technical support to developing countries"－on which the countries couldn't reach a consensus at the last UN climate conference in 2019.

For long, the most contentious issue at the climate talks has been the different emission-reduction obligations of developed and developing countries. Developed economies put emphasis on the current and future impacts of global warming, and want all countries to follow a universal emission-reduction policy while promising to cut as much emissions as possible.

Developing countries, on their part, emphasize historical responsibility, and call for common but differentiated responsibilities－as enshrined in UN documents－because they cannot achieve the same emission-reduction target as developed countries for lack of funds or technologies, or both. That's why the two sides have failed to work out an effective solution.

More important, developed countries have not fulfilled their commitment to provide financial and technological support to developing ones. At the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009, rich nations pledged to channel $100 billion a year to developing countries by 2020, in order to help them adapt to and mitigate further rise in temperature. But an OECD report in September said the developed countries had contributed only about $80 billion to their developing counterparts by last year.

Some developed countries don't think they have the responsibility to help low-income countries adapt to climate change and mitigate potential temperature rise after 2020, which will make climate-vulnerable countries even more vulnerable and helpless.

Besides, the COVID-19 pandemic and increasing global uncertainties have prevented many countries from setting ambitious emission-reduction targets. And until the pandemic is contained worldwide, global economic and scientific cooperation, including taking effective climate action, may not be possible.

The pandemic has increased developing countries' financial burden and hindered their efforts to cut emissions. Worse, many low-income economies, which are at a crucial stage of their development, face economic recession due to the pandemic. So they cannot balance development and climate action, because doing so would mean compromising on poverty alleviation, job creation, livelihood improvement, which will make it more difficult for them to contribute to global climate action in the future.

Also, developing economies are reluctant to shun coal. More than 35 percent of electricity generation worldwide is from coal, with most of the coal-fired power plants being in developing countries. That's because the shift from fossil fuels to clean energy requires huge funds and advanced technologies, neither of which developing countries have. But despite the developing countries not giving up coal, China has announced it will stop funding coal projects overseas.

No country alone can tackle climate change, or is immune to the impacts of global warming. Only global efforts, especially by the developed economies, can mitigate the impacts of climate change. Therefore, the Glasgow climate conference should urge the developed world to honor its commitments and help the developing countries with the required funds and technologies to fight climate change.

The author is head of the China Institute for Studies in Energy Policy at Xiamen University. The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

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