Sustainable Development and Environmental Issues

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

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Governments continue to dither and differ on solutions and their adoption. Experts are in panic because the rich nations are trying to lock in their advantages by revising the 1992 Rio bargain and re-ordering their Kyoto Protocol obligations, inviting sharp division between haves and have-nots, on a similar pattern as was created by the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) when the Nuclear Powers tried to impose an unequal treaty to which India never became a signatory. Now, belatedly the Nuclear haves are tackling the anomalies through the India-USA Nuclear Deal.

On Climate Change, a new bargain is being hammered out for fashioning a 2009 Copenhagen Protocol to rich nations’ advantage.

The Kyoto Protocol had targeted only 7 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions below 1990 levels but richer nations did not adhere to their commitments. For their failure, they are blaming India and China. They are resorting to high sounding rhetoric to justify their lack of responsibility and asserting that global warming cannot be slowed down unless India and China agree to cut their emissions at par with them, even though emission levels in these countries are much lower.

Decision makers in rich countries hold the ultimate power to decide the fate of billions but cannot think beyond their own national and geographic boundaries.

They can also not think of times beyond their own. They care only for their immediate national interests, pushing the world to the brink of global disaster. But, the threat of climate change is global and cannot be dealt with by individual nations who all face the challenge of sustainable development.

Men of narrow vision believe that global warming would affect different countries differently and some, who currently wield great political clout, are smug with the thought that their own country would not be so badly off. The rich nations, with their vast technological resources, appear to have calculated that countries in the colder climes would, in fact, gain by climate changes because warming would bring about favourable changes in terms of cropping and vegetation, thus providing them with greater food security than they enjoy currently.

Such beliefs could prove devastatingly illusory. Recently, US Senator Joe Lieberman acknowledged at a group discussion that US government dishes out such ideas and information as foster resistance in the US Congress to America slashing its high emissions. This was the reason why the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade Bill got defeated in the US Congress. We must not forget that the USA accounts for nearly a quarter of the world’s total carbon emissions. The sly diplomacy of the western nation-States led by the USA is shocking.

The Western powers, whether it is the question of subsidies at the WTO’s Doha rounds of talks or global bargaining on climate change, are trying to trick and deceive the poorer nations into arrangements that would render them even more vulnerable. And, Western powers’ political and economic dominance will continue. They are not willing to work out arrangements that are equitable and fair to all nations.

China and India are being targeted to bear the maximum brunt of climate change even though their current contribution to global warming is small compared to that of the advanced G-8 countries. China and India’s enlarging economies are causing concern among Western nations and they would do everything possible to keep India and China at a competitive disadvantage.

Western diplomacy works on the principle that national interest is the ultimate director of foreign policy and the powerful nation is entitled to use all the persuasive-coercive tools to make other nations bend to the powerful nation’s demands and interests. But in the present situation, they are forgetting that there will be no winners against global dimensions of climate change. Climate change, as is already being seen, will make weather patterns more unpredictable everywhere, including in higher latitudes. In the upper reaches of the Arctic already warming is twice as fast as the rest of the world. Un-seasonal heat and rain, floods and droughts have affected Europe and USA as much as Asian countries. Climate change potentially can wreck agriculture, public health and ecosystems in colder lands also, besides breeding unmanageable viruses. Strangely, in the subsahara regions it is bringing rain and greenery and a new pattern of cropping that these deserts never saw before.

Another important point to remember is that China and India are no longer weak on the negotiating table. The western countries are not in a position to ignore the huge developing markets and economies of these two Asian giants. These two countries are fast developing and leading other poor nations in the WTO and other forums. Western powers are finding it difficult to divide the poor nations at the economic forums and so is also the case at the Climate Change Conferences.

There is danger and risk in this climate of distrust and division among governments of the world for people everywhere. These divisions and unresolved disagreements will create more threats for humanity. The efforts and vision of sustainable development at this time is enveloped in an atmosphere of devilish disregard to the questions of survival. We cannot talk of sustainable development and national interests at the same time. Globalization is being exploited by richer nations to gain an upper hand and not for treating the McLuhanesque global village as one community.

It is true that our scientific knowledge at this time is short of fully understanding and answering questions that are being thrown up by climate change and changing world environment. So, US President and other western leaders find the environmental issues as mere exaggerated projections of scientists and human rightists. They, therefore, underestimate the likely impact of climate change.

In the present international political scenario, we can see that climate change could escalate interstate and intrastate competition and contest over natural resources. For India, this potential threat looms very large. The Great Game over water, experts predict, will have Asia in its grip. China’s control over Tibet, which is the source of all major Asian rivers except the Ganga, may create problems of continental dimensions for agriculture and sustainable development and countries from India to Cambodia could find it difficult to sustain the growth of their economies. “Accelerated melting of glaciers and mountain snows would affect river-water flows, although higher average temperatures are likely to bring more rainfall in the tropics”, says Brahma Chellany, a security expert.

Higher extremes of weather could create a rise in ocean levels and will “spur greater interstate and intrastate migration—especially of the poor and the vulnerable—from the delta and coastal regions to the hinterland”. The influx of aliens would disturb the local populations and “provoke a backlash” and internal and regional security will be threatened as there would be strains on the resources. Already, Bangladesh has been losing land to saltwater incursion and further trend in this environmental change will force its people to enter India in hordes.

The whole concept of sustainable development is in jeopardy because of climate change and human security itself faces the maximum threat. Climate Change will devastate the vulnerable economic sectors altogether. Disparities are bound to get aggravated. The resource conflicts and uncontrollable migrations, failing states, spreading extremism and high frequency of unpredictable weather are in store for the whole world, if governments do not come together to deal with questions arising from the issue of changing climate and its impact on human environment.

The changing pattern of production and how it will impact humanity at large is illustrated by the diversion of food for bio fuels that has created a windfall for major farm industries while pushing the world’s poor to greater backwardness. This is how the issues of environment and sustainable development are inextricably linked. Another innovative but highly counterproductive measure is the buying of carbon credits from poor nation-States to exceed carbon emission targets of richer nations. This is proving as no more than mere “environmental grandstanding” and a form of “carbon colonialism” because, ultimately, the net impact on global warming remains the same.