Time for the rich world to keep its promises on tackling climate change
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The few dozen inhabitants of Fanalei, one of the eastern Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, will struggle to monitor this month’s talks in Glasgow, nearly 15,000km away. The island is tiny, with no internet access or even mains electricity.
But the discussions at COP26 could have a profound impact on the people of Fanalei, where I stayed during a two-year journey through 26 countries to write a book on responses to global climate change. Rises in the sea level and storm surges have rapidly eaten away at their island, destroying their church and a growing number of houses, and forcing steady migration to a larger neighbouring island.
In what seems an ominous foretaste of strife across the world, that migration has caused a bitter dispute between the Fanalei refugees and their new neighbours, some of whom accuse the migrants of illegally annexing land.
Amid the tensions, however, both sides agree on one thing: the fairest solution would be for rich countries, which bear the bulk of the blame for the climate crisis, to cover the costs forced upon its victims.
One day, I sat down with Robert Tehena, the Fanalei migrants’ most feared antagonist, outside his home in a forest clearing. He felt sorry for them, he told me. But why should he be forced to give up his land, when he had done nothing to drive the global warming that had destroyed the migrants’ homes?
“Those countries are responsible,” he said, referring to the richer nations, “but they are not taking responsibility.”
He is right, and COP26 is a chance to start addressing his complaint. It would take absurd logical contortions to deny the moral imperative for rich countries to deploy very large sums to help poorer ones cope with the effects of climate change. The US’s per capita carbon emissions are 15.2 tonnes a year — orders of magnitude more than Ethiopia’s 0.1 tonnes, and more than double the figure in China. Even in gross aggregate terms, China has still put far less carbon into the atmosphere than either the US or Europe, which have much smaller populations.
And, while horrific events — from wildfires in California to floods in western Germany — are alerting the world’s richer inhabitants to the most immediate dangers of climate change, my travels drove home how disproportionately this crisis affects poorer communities.
On the arid plains of north-east Ethiopia, I spent time with Afar herders who have been reduced to total dependence on government grain handouts, after their flocks were devastated by drought and locust infestation — both linked by scientists to global warming.
In Bangladesh, intruding salt water is destroying rice farms and propelling millions towards the overcrowded slums of the capital, Dhaka.
From Nicaraguan coffee plantations to Filipino shanty towns, I saw how increasingly powerful storms are destroying the livelihoods of people who, by western standards, were terribly poor to start with.
The rich countries’ breach of a promise to deliver $100bn a year in climate-related assistance is shameful, as is the relative lack of domestic controversy around it. The failure will look still more grotesque if COP26 yields no meaningful progress towards that target. But, just as important as the headline figure, is how the money is used.
The bulk of the funds deployed so far by the UN-backed Green Climate Fund, for example, have gone to help poorer countries pursue clean development projects, rather than assisting their response to disasters that have been caused by climate change.
In the Solomon Islands, the GCF has funded a hydroelectric power plant for the capital, but it has yet to assist in the resettlement of migrants such as the Fanalei villagers. That requires financial backers and development professionals to help the migrants acquire new, and potentially radically different, skills.
Yet a renewed focus on funding climate adaptation in these countries is vital, alongside the important work on emissions mitigation.
On the mitigation front, a shift towards low-carbon power is under way, in another megatrend I saw up close on my travels. From Saudi energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman to coal communities in Australia, all those I met in the fossil-fuel industry were clear about its long-term decline.
I encountered tycoons, from China’s billionaire electric car maker He Xiaopeng to maverick Silicon Valley venture capital investor Vinod Khosla, who are convinced that clean energy is the most lucrative prospect in global business.
Yet the pace of progress towards net zero emissions is woefully short of what is needed.
Most experts I speak to in business and economics seem to agree that the only serious way to address this challenge will be a rigorous international carbon-pricing regime. Right now, even the EU’s carbon-pricing system, the world’s most advanced, covers less than half the continent’s emissions. China’s recently introduced scheme has a carbon price so low as to make minimal difference to national emissions. In the US, the Biden administration has shown negligible enthusiasm for this area of policy.
If COP26 proves yet another high-profile multilateral failure, it is likely to become an iconic event for future historians, who will debate the perversity of leaders who spurned obvious means of tackling the crisis. But, if it defies expectations and produces substantive progress, they may yet come to regard it as the moment the slide towards climate catastrophe began to slow.
Much sooner than that, whatever the outcome in Glasgow, the people of Fanalei, like billions of others around the world, will feel the consequences.
The writer is editor of the Financial Times Moral Money newsletter, and author of ‘Race for Tomorrow’
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