“Why contribute to our own destruction?”
Last November 2021, the 26th Conference of Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change convened in Glasgow, Scotland. In view of the COVID-19 pandemic, the UNFCCC Secretariat and the COP Presidency, held by the United Kingdom, had to make significant changes with regard to attendance and participation in the conference. While these efforts have been lauded for their attempts to create what has been initially dubbed the “most inclusive COP ever,” valid concerns have also been brought to the limelight, particularly with regard to the vaccine inequality which led to the palpable lack of representation from participants hailing from the Global South.
Together with Manila Observatory colleagues Joy Reyes and Tonichi Regalado, I wrote about how wide discrepancies in vaccine distribution have made it extremely difficult for countries in the Global South to fully participate in the Glasgow meeting, and while the UK government offered jabs to delegates who wished to attend, there were two hurdles to face. First, it required early confirmation of attendance to the conference, which many participants could not do given the uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic; and second, vaccinating delegates did not mean vaccinating entire citizens.
Due to the vaccine inequality, plenty of participants from the Global South were not able to attend the COP, which highlighted not just the reality of lack of access to vaccines but put into question the equality of participation in the conference itself. Specifically, this meant that countries in the Global South, historically the least emitters of greenhouse gases and the most climate vulnerable nations, were unjustly deprived of global platforms from which they could demand decisive and just action on climate change.
The more serious climate and pandemic injustice is of course the one that is playing in the real economy, in the real world where climate change is already wreaking havoc in communities all over the world and where coronavirus variants like Delta and Omicron are infecting and killing people everywhere even as it has made hundreds of millions poorer.
Those of us who work on climate change and disaster risk reduction and response know that Typhoon Odette, that hit the Visayas and Mindanao in December, is not the last and nor will it be the strongest typhoon Filipinos will experience. Storms will be stronger, more destructive, and more frequent. As I always say, we are not a small island state, but we are a country of small islands. Loss and damage is our future.
What is causing this? Not God, not nature. It’s human activities. It’s using coal and oil. It’s cutting trees. It’s not disposing garbage properly. It’s bad, very bad land use like reclamation projects.
It does not take rocket science to address these causes. Doing our fair share of mitigation and reduction of greenhouse gases, starting with ending coal power in the Philippines. Why contribute to our own destruction? Using coal is assisted suicide.
Adaptation measures need to be accelerated, including getting much better at disaster risk reduction and fundamental changes in land use policy. Absolutely no more land reclamation projects should be allowed – in Manila Bay, in Dumaguete, in Cebu, etc. Reclamation is also assisted suicide.
There are also many nature-based solutions that we can implement. Improving our mangrove defenses. Large scale reforestation and afforestation focusing more on protecting planted trees, unlike the current National Greening Program. Retooling to make agriculture more climate-smart. Above all, making our cities more resilient, including scaling up urban forestry and agriculture plus smart transportation and infrastructure interventions, and definitely not more than expressways like Parex over Pasig that will contribute only to more carbon and other pollutants in the air and destroy our heritage.
At the international level, we must work tirelessly to get all countries to adopt and implement nationally determined contributions that will enable us to keep the increase of global temperature at 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. That means phasing out the use of coal and other fossil fuels faster than envisioned. That means getting developed countries to deliver on climate finance.
Above all, and that is my personal priority and the focus of our policy team in the Manila Observatory, we must really work hard to establish an international loss and damage facility in the next 2-3 years. We needed that facility yesterday and we can’t afford to lose more time.
In the meantime, however, our efforts to address climate change is stymied by a pandemic that refuses to go away. That too is experienced by countries and people differently, where social inequality has been a scourge and a burden preventing sustainable and effective solutions.
My hope is that in 2022, we will finally get a handle on these big issues and just transition pathways become clearer and are implemented.
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