CLIMATE CHANGE

QUOTES:

“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children” – Native
American Proverb

“The sustainability train has left the station. Get on board or get left behind…
Those who fail to bet on the green economy will be living in a grey future.” —
UN secretary general António Guterres during a 2017 speech

“Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can
avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and more
powerful storms.”

 Barack Obama, President of the United States

 Unless we take action on climate change, future generations will be
roasted, toasted, fried and grilled.”
 -Christine Lagarde

HEADINGS

Warming World
The Two-Degree Delusion
Climate Change Is A Chronic Condition
Paris Isn’t Burning
The Clean Energy Revolution
Climate Extremes And Global Health

CHANGING THE GAME

How to Understand the

Geopolitics of Climate
Change
The two-degree target continues to maintain a
talismanic hold over global efforts to address climate
change, despite the fact that virtually all sober
analyses conclude that the target is now
unobtainable.

Warming World
Why Climate Change Matters More Than
Anything Else
INRODUCTION:
The world seems to be in a state of permanent crisis. The liberal
international order is besieged from within and without. Democracy is in
decline. A lackluster economic recovery has failed to significantly raise
incomes for most people in the West. A rising China is threatening U.S.
dominance, and resurgent international tensions are increasing the risk of a
catastrophic war.
Yet there is one threat that is as likely as any of these to define this century:
climate change. The disruption to the earth’s climate will ultimately
command more attention and resources and have a greater influence on the
global economy and international relations than other forces visible in the
world today. Climate change will cease to be a faraway threat and become
one whose effects require immediate action.

FACTS:

The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, the

main greenhouse gas, now exceeds 410 parts per
million, the highest level in 800,000 years. Global
average surface temperatures are 1.2 degrees
Celsius higher than they were before the Industrial
Revolution. The consensus scientific estimate is that
the maximum temperature increase that will
Humanity still has around 20 years before stopping
short of that threshold will become essentially
impossible, but most plausible projections show that
the world will exceed it.
Of the 17 warmest years on record, 16 have
occurred since 2001. This past winter,
temperatures in parts of the Arctic jumped to 25
degrees Celsius above normal.
he two-degree target continues to maintain a
talismanic hold over global efforts to address
climate change, despite the fact that virtually all
sober analyses conclude that the target is now
unobtainable.
(atmospheric concentrations of carbon today
stand at 407 parts per million, versus 275 prior
to the start of the Industrial Revolution), even
an extreme precautionary approach that ended
all greenhouse gas emissions immediately would
not much affect the trajectory of global
temperatures or climate impacts until late in
this century at the earliest.
Emissions rose 1.4 percent last year and no
major industrialized country is on track to meet
the emission control pledges it made in Paris,
which means that the world is way off track to
meeting the target of limiting warming to two
degrees Celsius above preindustrial
temperatures. Scientifically, the news is even
grimmer. New research in climate science
indicates that extreme events, such as heat
waves, the collapse of major ice sheets, and
mass extinctions, are becoming dramatically
more probable.
Aaron Wildavsky outlined decades ago: “richer
is safer.” Scientists believed that because
wealthier societies had the resources to adapt to
a warmer world, poor countries would suffer
more. This presented a political problem
because most emissions come from rich or
emerging economies. In fact, the wealthiest one
billion people around the world (living in both
rich and poor nations) are responsible for more
than 50 percent of the emissions of carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
American Meteorological Association (AMS)
declared that “we’re experiencing new weather,
because we’ve made a new climate.”
Beyond 2050, as much as 44 percent of the
planet’s land areas will be exposed to drying.
This will lead to severe drought conditions
throughout southern Europe, North America
(mainly the eastern and southwestern United
States and Mexico), much of southeast Asia, and
most of the Amazon—affecting about 1.4 billion
people. In the latitude bands between 30
degrees N and 30 degrees S the probability of
multi-decadal drought will rise to 80 percent.
There is also a heightened risk of more extreme
rainfall, which, coupled with population growth,
will expose an additional two billion people to
floods.
IMPACTS/ EXAMPLES:

According to the World Health Organization,

seven million people every year die as a result of
this kind of pollution, which causes lower
respiratory infections, lung cancer, heart
disease, strokes, and chronic obstructive
pulmonary disease. (
For example, experts have attributed to climate
change catastrophes such as the 2003 heat wave
in France that killed more than 10,000 people
and the 2010 heat wave in Russia that killed an
estimated 15,000, along with other major storms
and droughts such as the parching that
is devastating rural areas in Australia.
Beyond 2050, there is a 50 percent probability
that about half of the world’s population will be
subject to mean temperatures in the summer
that are hotter than the hottest summer on
record unless the world takes immediate and
large-scale action.
. As temperatures rise, the distribution of
climate phenomena will shift. Floods that used
to happen once in a 100 years will occur every
50 or every 20. The tail risks will become more
extreme, making events such as the 50 inches of
rain that fell in 24 hours in Hawaii earlier this
year more common.
geopolitics.
New weather patterns will trigger
social and economic upheaval. Rising seas,
dying farmlands, and ever more powerful storms
and floods will render some countries
uninhabitable. These changes will test the
international system in new and unpredictable
ways. global politics. Several major countries,
including China and the United States, have
large populations and valuable infrastructure
that are vulnerable to climate change. Their
governments will find themselves diverting
military resources to carry out rescue operations
and rebuild devastated towns and cities. That
will take large numbers of soldiers and military
hardware away from preparing for conflicts with
foreign adversaries.
EXAMPLE: In 2017, when three huge storms
battered the United States in quick succession,
civilian disaster authorities had to be
backstopped by the military to prevent huge
losses of life.
The total cost to the United States of these
storms and other weather-related emergencies
in 2017 was $300 billion.
China: n the north, in the country’s industrial
heartland, whole regions are running out of
water, affecting more than 500 million people.
Over the past 25 years, some 28,000 Chinese
rivers have disappeared. Solving these problems
will not be cheap. A single ambitious
infrastructure project to transport water from
the south to the north has already cost the
Chinese government at least $48 billion. The
project is not yet complete, but China claims
that it has improved Beijing’s water security and
benefited 50 million people. To deal with
flooding in places such as Shanghai, China has
embarked on a “sponge cities” initiative to boost
natural drainage. Since 2015, China has
invested $12 billion in this effort, and the price
tag will ultimately run into the hundreds of
billions of dollars.
POOR COUNTRIES: Each year, the monsoon
brings floods to the Indus River in Pakistan. But
in 2010, the flooding took on epic proportions,
displacing as many as 20 million people and
killing nearly 2,000. The United States provided
$390 million in immediate relief funding, and
the U.S. military delivered some 20 million
pounds of supplies.
In 2017, after Hurricane Irma hit Barbuda, the
entire population of the Caribbean island—some
1,800 people—had to be evacuated. Kiribati, a
collection of Pacific islands, most of which rise
only a few meters above sea level, has purchased
land in neighboring Fiji as a last resort in the
face of rising seas
DROUGHTS: In recent years, droughts in both
the Horn of Africa and the continent’s southern
countries have put millions at risk of thirst or
famine. In 2011, Somalia, already riven by
decades of war, experienced a drought and
subsequent famine that led to as many as
260,000 deaths. Earlier this year, Cape Town,
South Africa, a city of nearly four million people,
was able to avoid running out of water only
through heroic conservation measures.
As well as creating new crises, climate factors
will exacerbate existing ones. Some 800,000 of
Myanmar’s Rohingya minority group have fled to
Bangladesh, driven out by ethnic cleansing.
Many of the refugee camps they now occupy are
in areas prone to flash floods during the
monsoon.
The seasons are changing. Dry spells are occurring
when meteorologists would normally expect rain.
Lack of rain increases the risk of forest fires, such as
those that occurred in California last year. When it
does rain, too often it is all at once, as happened in
Houston during Hurricane Harvey. As sea levels rise
and storm surges get stronger, what were once
normal high-tide events will flood coastal
infrastructure, as has already happened in Miami in
recent years, necessitating the installation of storm
water pumping systems at the cost of hundreds of
millions of dollars.
Climate change will also make international
tensions more severe. Analysts have periodically
warned of impending water wars, but thus far,
countries have been able to work out most
disputes peacefully. India and Pakistan, for
example, both draw a great deal of water from
the Indus River, which crosses disputed
territory. But although the two countries have
fought several wars with each other, they have
never come to blows over water sharing, thanks
to the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, which provides
a mechanism for them to manage the river
together. Yet higher demand and increasing
scarcity have raised tensions over the Indus.
India’s efforts to build dams upstream have
been challenged by Pakistan, and in 2016, amid
political tensions, Indian Prime Minister
Narendra Modi temporarily suspended India’s
participation in joint meetings to manage the
river. Peaceful cooperation will be harder in the
future.
Several Southeast Asian countries cooperate
over the Mekong River through the Mekong
River Commission, but China, the largest of the
six countries through which the river flows and
where the river originates, is not a member. The
Chinese government and other upstream
countries have built dams on the Mekong that
threaten to deprive fishing and agricultural
communities in Vietnam and other downstream
countries of their livelihoods.

Nile: Ethiopia is building a vast dam on the

river for irrigation and to generate power, a
move that will reduce the river’s flow in Egypt
and Sudan. Until now, Egypt has enjoyed
disproportionate rights to the Nile (a colonial-
era legacy), but that is set to end, requiring
delicate negotiations over water sharing and
how quickly Ethiopia will fill the reservoir
behind the dam.
In 2010, for example, after a drought destroyed
about one-fifth of Russia’s wheat harvest, the
Russian government banned grain exports. That
move, along with production declines in
Argentina and Australia, which were also
affected by drought, caused global grain prices
to spike. Those price rises may have helped
destabilize some already fragile countries. In
Egypt, for example, annual food-price inflation
hit 19 percent in early 2011, fueling the protests
that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.
Melting sea ice in the Arctic has opened up new
lanes for shipping and fields for oil and gas
exploration, leading Canada, Russia, the United
States, and other Arctic nations to bicker over
the rights to control these new resources.
As demand for clean energy grows, countries
will spar over subsidies and tariffs as each tries
to shore up its position in the new green
economy. China’s aggressive subsidies for its
solar power industry have triggered a backlash
from the makers of solar panels in other
countries, with the United States imposing
tariffs in 2017 and India considering doing
something similar.
Since manufacturing the batteries used in
electric cars requires rare minerals, such as
cobalt, lithium, and nickel, which are found
largely in conflict-ridden places such as the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, the rise of
battery-powered vehicles could prompt a
dangerous new scramble for resources.
There are myriad potentially contentious
policies governments might enact in response to
changing climate conditions. Banning exports of
newly scarce resources, acquiring land overseas,
mandating the use of biofuels, enacting rules to
conserve forests, and a thousand other choices
will all create winners and losers and inflame
domestic and international tensions.

THE BURNING QUESTION

RECOMMENDATIONS:

Last year, when U.S. President Donald Trump

announced his intention to withdraw the United
States from the Paris climate agreement, many other
countries, including China, France, Germany, India,
and the United Kingdom, responded by doubling
down on their support for the deal. French President
Emmanuel Macron hosted an international meeting
on climate change last December and even set up a
fund to attract leading climate scientists, especially
those from the United States, to France.
U.S. governors, mayors, and chief executives
have remained committed to climate action.
Last year, former New York Mayor Michael
Bloomberg formed the We Are Still In coalition,
which now includes some 2,700 leaders across
the country
Leading technology companies based in
California, such as Google, are also part of the
coalition. They have set ambitious
internal renewable energy targets covering their
entire operations. Given their vast size and
global supply chains, these companies have
enormous potential reach.
the security implications in the UN Security
Council, fossil fuel subsidies in the G-20, short-
lived gases such as hydrofluorocarbons through
the Montreal Protocol, and deforestation
through efforts such as the New York
Declaration on Forests, for example. This
collection of efforts may be messier than
centralizing everything through one global
agreement, but avoiding a single point of failure
and letting different groups and deals tackle the
problems they are best suited to fix may produce
more durable results.
hina and the United States will be central to the
global response. Together, the two countries are
responsible for more than 40 percent of global
emissions; China alone accounts for 28 percent.
Advocates of renewable
energy had attributed flat emissions to the
falling cost of solar panels. Energy efficiency
devotees had seen in the pause proof that
economic activity had been decoupled from
energy consumption. Advocates of fossil fuel
divestment had posited that the carbon bubble
had finally burst.
The two-degree threshold, and the
various carbon budgets and emissions reduction
targets that accompany it, has provided the
justification for prohibitions at the World Bank
and other international development
institutions on finance for fossil fuel
development.
The ultimate goal of climate change scientists
remains unchanged: deep cuts in emissions.
This will require testing and deploying new
technologies—for example, schemes to capture
and store greenhouse gas pollution and systems
for massively integrating renewable power into
the electric grid. Nuclear power may also have a
fresh role to play in making energy systems
cleaner but it must first overcome adverse
public and political opinion in many countries.
Still, new research suggests that even cutting
emissions to zero won’t be enough.
In the long haul, deep decarbonization—the
reduction of emissions of carbon dioxide and
other warming gases nearly to zero—will be
needed
Finally, societies must start preparing for more
frequent and more extreme weather events. This
means hardening or abandoning coastal areas,
developing crops that are resistant to droughts
and extreme heat, building systems that can
help farmers predict extreme weather, and
finding new ways to conserve and reuse water.
n a transformed climate, more than half of the
population may be exposed to extreme heat
waves and perhaps one-third to vector-borne
diseases. Seeking alliance with faith leaders,
health-care providers and other community
leaders should be an integral part of the
strategy on climate change.
These trends have enabled major diplomatic
breakthroughs, most notably the 2015 Paris
agreement. In that pact, 195 countries pledged
to make significant reductions in their
greenhouse gas emissions. “We’ve shown what’s
possible when the world stands as
one,” proclaimed U.S. President Barack Obama
after the talks concluded.
International Energy Agency, the world’s most
respected forecaster of energy-market trends. In
2002, the agency predicted that it would take 28
years for the world to generate more than 500
terawatt-hours of wind energy; instead, it took
eight. And in 2010, the agency projected that it
would take until 2024 to install 180 gigawatts of
solar capacity; that level was reached in 2015,
almost a decade ahead of schedule.
Between 2008 and 2016, the U.S. economy grew
by 12 percent while carbon emissions from
energy generation fell by about 11 percent—the
first time the link between the two had been
broken for more than a year at a time.
China plans to invest $340 billion in renewable
energy sources by 2020; Saudi Arabia is
investing $50 billion. In the last year alone,
India doubled its solar capacity. It is installing
solar panels so fast that Prime Minister
Narendra Modi’s audacious goal of reaching 100
gigawatts of solar capacity by 2022 no longer
seems like a pipe dream.
CLIMATE CHANGE IS A CHRONIC ISSUE
. Already, climate impacts ranging from extreme
heat (Phoenix, Los Angeles) and sea level rise
(Miami, Norfolk) to inland flooding (Grand
Forks, St. Louis) and warming winters
(Minneapolis, Aspen) are taxing state and local
governments: in 2017 alone, there were 16
climate-related disasters in the United States
that each caused $1 billion or more in damages.
These costs hammer cities in the short term but
also mortgage their future, as bond-rating
agencies begin to downgrade cities based on
frequent climate events.
Climate impacts are also causing businesses to
relocate and change their models. The nonprofit
Carbon Disclosure Project, which collects
climate risk and carbon emission disclosure
information from more than 6,000 companies,
has found that over 70 percent of global
companies believe physical climate impacts will
disrupt their supply chains and are making key
investment and location decisions with an eye
toward these impacts.
WARMER WINTERS
Another chronic effect of climate change is warmer
winters. The small U.S. ski towns that host 55 million
visitors each year depend on snow for their
livelihoods. Last year saw a ten percent decrease in
skiers due to low snow conditions and $1 billion in
lost revenues. Aspen, Colorado, one of the wealthiest
municipalities in the United States, opened its
first soup kitchen last season because of lost
revenues.

FUTURE FLOODS
Flooding is another type of chronic climate condition,
both the coastal flooding stemming from sea level
rise and the flooding from climate-related storms. On
the latter, the experience of the Greater Houston
area is instructive. Although the flood damage caused
by Hurricane Harvey was unprecedented, Houston
has experienced seven episodes of extreme flooding
since 2001—including the devastating Tropical Storm
Allison, which dropped 40 inches of rain on the city,
and the 2016 Tax Day Flood, with over 17 inches of
rain, eight fatalities, and the destruction of 700
homes.

HOW CITIES CAN RESPOND

First, cities and states clearly must acknowledge

not only the need to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions but also the need to manage the
physical impacts of chronic climate change.
Cities in particular should commission climate
risk analysis using available climate science
modeling that factors in both acute and chronic
climate conditions over several decades.
Cities should also work across departments to
move toward decarbonization. Investing in
distributed energy systems often has the added
advantage of making many cities more resilient,
since these systems are less likely to go down in
a storm or under extreme heat conditions. They
should add options to directly reduce carbon
dioxide emissions, including carbon dioxide
removal and purchasing low-carbon concrete,
steel, and other building materials.
CASE IN POINT: One example is Tulsa,
Oklahoma, where municipal leaders have taken
steps to manage chronic flooding, including
construction of retention ponds, stringent
application of flood maps to development, and
relocation of flood-prone homes. This has led to
a dramatic reduction in the city’s flood
insurance rates. The U.S. Department of Defense
has done the same.