Nature’s fury: The UN cannot solve the problem of climate change
According to Europe's Copernicus Climate Change Service, the summer of 2023 was the hottest one on record. Many countries have experienced abnormal meteorological phenomena, ranging from devastating earthquakes to widespread floods and droughts in regions that are not normally prone to them. But as recent history has repeatedly shown, international organizations cannot effectively deal with the consequences of climate disasters: developed countries deliberately underreport carbon dioxide emissions, which enables them not to deduct their fair share to the aid funds. Nowadays the UN is faced with the task of creating a reliable forecast, but the countries cannot come to a consensus on several important matters.
The reality
The correlation between natural disasters and human contribution to climate change has been debated since 2005, when the devastating Hurricane Katrina left 700,000 New Orleans residents homeless. The modern take on climate change is that, accelerated by human activity, it leads to the aggravation of adverse weather conditions. Industrial overproduction contributes directly to the increase in frequency and intensity of climate disasters.
On September 21, 2022, a series of earthquakes struck Iran's West Azerbaijan Province, near the Turkish border. In the beginning of 2023, heavy rains caused severe floods in Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, England, and 15 countries in Africa, killing more than 2,200 people. On February 6, 2023, an earthquake of magnitude 7.8 struck southern and central Turkey and northern and western Syria. More than 570 aftershocks were recorded in the first 24 hours following the earthquake and more than 30,000 by May 2023. More than 50,000 dead, 297 missing and more than 100,000 injured were reported in 11 of Turkey's 17 affected provinces, while the subterranean tremors destroyed 4 million buildings. A month later, heavy rains hit the affected areas, leading to devastating floods in Sanliurfa and Adiyaman.
In March, heavy rains led to the overflow of rivers in Northern India and Pakistan, and subterranean tremors with a magnitude of 6.8-7 were recorded in Ecuador and Papua New Guinea. In May, Cyclone Mocha destroyed 2.5 thousand houses in Bangladesh, during this time 6 major cities in Italy were flooded, and more than 50 thousand people were forced to leave their homes. Then a heat wave hit North America, which, on the one hand, led to forest fires in Alberta, and on the other - accelerated the melting of snow in the mountains, which resulted in floods and landslides. July was the hottest month on record. During the third week of the month, temperature records were set in Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay. Weather historian Maximiliano Herrera called it "the most extreme event the world has ever seen." Strong winds and high temperatures have caused dozens of wildfires in central and southern Chile. A World Weather Attribution study found that climate change has made India and Bangladesh at least 30 times more likely to experience heat waves.
Europe has faced drought-like conditions. The Alps have seen 63% less snowfall, the canals in Venice have dried up, and Catalonia has experienced the worst drought seen in decades. The Fuente de Piedra Lagoon, home to the largest colony of flamingos on the Iberian Peninsula, dried up for the first time in 20 years. At the same time, torrential rains hit China, Nepal and India, where floods killed more than two thousand people. In South Korea, the rains were the heaviest in 115 years. In August, heavy rains caused major floods in large parts of Slovenia and neighboring areas of Austria and Croatia. The level of the Sava, Mur and Drava rivers was exceptionally high, and streams in the Idrija, Cerkno and Škofja Loka hills overflowed their banks. In response, the authorities had to launch the National Flood Protection and Rescue Plan.
New technologies and attempts to prevent the crisis
Natural hazards (floods, droughts, earthquakes and tsunamis) are becoming more frequent and intense, impacting significantly on people and their lives. Poor planning and poverty in the most disaster-prone regions exacerbate the situation, creating conditions in which the consequences of disasters cannot be adequately addressed.
The first World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction was held in Japan in 1994. It resulted in the adoption of the Yokohama Strategy, which postulated that the international community should share technologies to prevent natural disasters and mitigate their consequences. However, 30 years later, monitoring organizations are primarily faced with the problem of reliability of data provided by the UN member states.
In November 2022, during COP27, Climate TRACE published data on emissions from more than 70,000 industrial facilities, including power plants, steel mills, urban road networks, and oil and gas fields. The researchers found that the leading countries, when sending data to the UN on emissions from oil and gas production, lowered their actual figures by at least three times.
According to a report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), CO2 emissions from land use are subject to change throughout the year, making it virtually impossible to make long-term predictions. As a result, with such high emission rates, it is necessary to remove excess carbon dioxide in order to achieve net-zero emissions within the required timeframe.
According to the QIC Global Infrastructure fund, global funding for the energy transition has already exceeded $1 trillion, but this amount needs to be increased manifold to attain the necessary objectives. The promising carbon capture and storage technology, which is aimed at separating carbon dioxide from industrial and energy sources, transporting it to a storage site, and isolating it from the atmosphere on a long-term basis, has yet to be deployed on a large scale. The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions estimates that there are at least 26 commercial carbon capture and storage projects in the world, 21 of which are only in their early stages of development.
Having analyzed 5152 startups, StartUs Insights came to the conclusion that it is possible to reduce carbon dioxide emissions through renewable energy sources. Among the drivers of this transition will be photovoltaic energy, artificial intelligence, vast amounts of data, distributed energy storage and hydropower, followed by wind power, bioenergy, grid integration, green hydrogen, cutting-edge robotics and block chain. The IPCC confirms that robots and AI can improve energy management in all spheres. However, there are risks of increased e-waste, job losses and a widening digital divide.
The concept of “vulnerability" and corruption
At the climate change conference in Copenhagen in 2009, rich countries, including Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, and Germany, made an agreement to collectively mobilize $100 billion per year for climate action in developing countries by 2020. Official data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, published last year, demonstrate that, in fact, only $17 billion were allocated, mainly due to the fact that the United States did not pay its share.
According to the UN estimates, in 2023, every 23rd person in the world will need help to survive. That is why the international community insists on expanding the scale of assistance, the need for which will grow as the temperature on the planet continues to increase.
In 2022, the World Food Programme (WFP) provided humanitarian aid to more than 160 million people, including those affected by climate-related disasters. WFP provided about $11 million in insurance payments to over 30 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America: analysts estimate that these regions account for up to 90 percent of all disasters each year.
By 2050, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Zambia, Angola, Somalia, Tanzania, Congo, Niger, Chad, Mauritania, India, Iraq, Nicaragua and Guatemala will be at a high risk of hunger due to climate change. Only Niger loses up to 120,000 hectares of arable land every year because of soil erosion and desertification. At the same time, all these countries contribute the least to greenhouse gas emissions.
This year, the EU and a group of 134 developing countries reached an agreement at COP27 to create a loss and damage fund. It will include debt relief, insurance and potential taxation of oil and gas profits. Within this year, a group of 24 government negotiators will work out the details: who should pay into the fund and who will be eligible to receive the money.
Countries with higher incomes tend to have more resources to deal with the inevitable effects of climate change. At the same time, the European Commission's chief negotiator Jacob Werksman said that the UN climate convention's classification of developed and developing countries, adopted in 1992, is outdated. Countries will have to revise the concept of "vulnerability", taking into account both geographical and economic factors. For example, Australia and the US are geographically vulnerable to fires, heat waves and droughts, but they have the money to deal with the consequences. In contrast, Mongolia and Libya do not face any major climate threats but lack the funds to overcome current environmental problems.
In March 2022, the IPCC attempted to create a map of vulnerabilities based on the INFORM Risk Index and the World Risk Index. The map takes into account access to basic infrastructure and health care, poverty levels and the public perception of corruption, which caused a lot of controversy. In fact, researchers ignored the impact of sea level rise, storms, heat stress or floods. As a result, most of sub-Saharan Africa received the mark of "very high vulnerability," while much of the Persian Gulf, South America and parts of southern Africa ended up with "low vulnerability." Many critics of this rating stated that national averages cannot take into account differences within countries and that corruption perception criteria may be biased against rich countries.
Thus, as climate disasters increase in frequency and intensity, with millions of people affected around the world, governments cannot agree on effective countermeasures to these humanitarian crises. Moreover, on the international scale rich countries ignore the demands to reduce carbon dioxide emissions or widely underreport them. There is a growing tension within the negotiating teams: China, where 92,000 square kilometers of coastline will be immersed under water as a result of a one-meter rise in sea level, is excluded from the list of countries that may need assistance. Guangzhou, Tianjin and Shanghai will be affected, and 67 million people will be forced to leave their homes. The African imbalance, meaning that the countries with the least impact on climate change suffer the most from its effects, has not yet been resolved. In addition to climate-related disasters, in the coming years the international community will face the challenges of hunger and the resulting increase in armed conflicts, large-scale displacements and disease outbreaks, which will undoubtedly be an additional burden on the global economy and health care system.
