Conflicts complicate climate efforts

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This article was published 23/11/2023 (711 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Thousands of delegates, dignitaries, lobbyists and activists will descend on Dubai later this month for COP28, this year’s annual United Nations climate conference. However, despite the past 12 months shattering heat records, focus on the gathering — an imperfect but necessary catalyst for climate action — risks being overshadowed by growing hostilities worldwide.

If so, COP28 may result in another bungled opportunity to rein in the runaway climate crisis, humanity’s biggest collective action problem.

Global warming is fast approaching the two degrees Celsius guardrail enshrined in the 2015 Paris climate accords, having already reached 1.32 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures. Scientific consensus says crossing the two degrees threshold could trigger ecological “tipping points” — a cascade of irreversible climate shocks with enormous negative consequences for economies and societies everywhere.

Yet the climate crisis is gaining pace at a time when, for numerous reasons, the world is witnessing a parallel surge in deadly conflicts. According to the Conflict Data Program at Uppsala University in Sweden, 55 countries — more than one in four globally — were affected by violence and unrest last year, be it from state or non-state actors.

Such instability makes it harder to enact long-term climate policies and unlock the private sector investment required to decarbonize, especially in emerging markets. It is also making it more difficult to respond to the climate disasters now unfolding right before our eyes.

Catastrophic floods in Libya in September — triggered by a cyclone over an unseasonably warm Mediterranean — killed thousands unnecessarily. The reason being the country’s two rival government factions, embroiled in civil war for over a decade, have routinely diverted resources away from critical infrastructure upgrades and instead used them to aid their power grabs, leaving civilians dangerously vulnerable to extreme weather events.

Elsewhere, hunger levels due to historic drought in the Horn of Africa and the continent’s Sahel region are being exacerbated by both jihadist insurgencies that block and steal humanitarian aid and intercommunal bloodshed between farmers and pastoralists over dwindling usable land and water.

Glacial retreat in the Himalayas threatens the sole source of water for drinking and agriculture for some two billion people. And yet the situation is being harnessed by both India and China as an opportunity to fortify military installations and move weapons systems into newly accessible pockets along their hotly contested border.

The environment has also been a casualty in Vladimir Putin’s determined effort to annihilate Ukraine. The country’s massive Nova Kakhovka hydroelectric dam collapsed on June 6 due to suspected Russian sabotage, flooding huge tracts of farmland and decimating several of Ukraine’s nature reserves. The contaminated water — saturated with industrial chemicals swept up in the deluge — then drained into the Black Sea. Ukrainian officials immediately denounced it as an intentional act of “ecocide.”

But the most important conflict for the future of the climate is between Beijing and Washington — one that has so far avoided military incident. Put simply, the great power competition between the world’s two largest economies and leading polluters has the potential to shape climate outcomes for everyone else on the planet.

The face-to-face meeting of China’s President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden during the APEC summit in San-Francisco on Nov. 15 represented a small, but important step to stabilizing relations, even though many more are still needed.

A day earlier, an identical statement released by both the U.S. State Department and China’s environment ministry pledged the two rivals would re-commit to tripling green technology capacity by 2030, accelerating methane reductions, tackling deforestation and more. Climate talks between China and the U.S. had been suspended since August 2022 over Beijing’s outrage over then congressional House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s provocative visit to Taiwan.

There is other good news: the unnerving uptick in global conflict hasn’t been enough to derail market forces from doing their job. The cost of renewable power sources like wind, solar and geothermal have plummeted. In most of the world, they are now cheaper to install than continuing to operate existing fossil fuel systems.

The International Energy Agency’s latest annual World Economic Outlook report, published in late October, suggests existing climate policies in place today mean renewables will become a pillar of the global energy system by 2030 — a timeline that even most activists might have previously considered unrealistic.

Nevertheless, virtually all nations still lag very far behind in adapting to this new uncharted era of climate breakdown. If governments and extremist groups put as much effort into fighting that battle instead of each other, things might really begin to change.

Kyle Hiebert is a Winnipeg-based researcher and analyst, and former deputy editor of the Africa Conflict Monitor.