Chapter 18 Review Questions Answer Key

Climate Change, Environment, and Development
  1. The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972). This book, which orig­inated from research commissioned by the Club of Rome, painted an apocalyptic picture of famine, re­source scarcity, hunger, ecosystem collapse, pollution, and reduction in life expectancy because of what it de­scribed as exponential increase in population and envi­ronmental degradation over the previous 30 years. The authors were critical of ma­terialism and called for environmental regulation and greater emphasis on conservation at the global level. [p. 322]
  1. The rise of environment as a key issue in international development is rooted in three facts. First is the extensive and increasing impact of humans on all aspects of the environment. Second, advances in science and technology have afforded not only better understanding of the extent of the environmental damage being caused by humans, but also the tools to communicate and disseminate this information more widely. Third, there has been a greater realization of the propensity of environmental degradation to undermine the very basis of economic development and human well-being, for example, air pollution in rapidly developing China. [p. 318]
  1. The main paradox is that whereas economic development is needed to achieve well-being, the process of economic growth often leads to environmental degradation, which in turn reduces well-being. Differences in understanding the exact nature of this relationship and how to resolve the complex interactions constitute the central challenge of environment–development politics across different scales of governance, from local through national to international levels. In addition, or rather in close relation to this paradox, environmental problems also exhibit two other defining characteristics—the tragedy of commons and the collective action problem. [pp. 318-9]
  1. Collective action problem describes the situation in which multiple individuals, communities or countries would all benefit from a certain action. For example, reducing greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change, but the associated cost of taking action makes it highly unlikely that any individual can or will undertake and solve the problem alone. The tragedy of the commons describes an economic problem in which individual users of a commonly owned resource (say, land for grazing or the atmosphere) each continues to try to reap the greatest benefit from exploiting the resource even when it is apparent that the demand for the resource has overwhelmed the supply. The tragedy is that every individual who consumes an additional unit directly harms others who can no longer enjoy the benefits. Furthermore, the overexploitation, driven by individual gain, Hardin argues will ultimately result in the degradation of the common resource. [p. 319]
  1. Global effort to address climate change has focused on the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiated in 1992 as part of the UNCED. The Kyoto Protocol is a key component of the UNFCCC because it contains mandatory targets for emissions reduction for states, detailed measures for implementation, and a compliance mechanism, which is the only one of its kind. In December 2015, during the 21st Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC in Paris, a new agreement designed to replace Kyoto was adopted (the Paris Agreement). It is intended that the agreement will come into force in 2020. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides crucial scientific evidence for climate policy. The IPCC was established in 1988 by the Executive Council of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and United Nations Environment Programme with a mandate to provide the world with a clear scientific view of the current state of knowledge on climate change and its potential environmental and socio-economic impacts. In the same year of its creation, the UN General Assembly endorsed the action by WMO and UNEP in jointly establishing the IPCC and called on the body to submit its first assessment report in time to feed into the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development in 1992. Today, the IPCC is the world’s foremost agency for scientific research on climate change, with five “assessment reports” to its credit, produced in 1990, 1995, 2001, 2007, and 2014. [pp. 326, 328]
  1. The UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol, for their part, may well pass as the most elaborate and complex agreement the world has ever negotiated. The regime embraces two main responses in its action against climate change. The first is mitigation, which focuses on the reduction of the amounts of greenhouse gas that states and other actors are emitting into the atmosphere. The second is adaptation, which focuses on how to cope with the impacts of climate change effects that cannot be mitigated. More recently, the concept of resilience, which considers adaptation as a process of coping with, responding to, and recovering from climatic shocks and stresses, has gained prominence. Mitigation and adaptation overlap because the more climate change effects are mitigated, the less the prospect that individuals, communities, and countries will need to adapt. Conversely, some efforts at adaptation, such as planting trees, can also help in mitigation. [p. 328]
  1. Developing countries have consistently demanded an effective global response to climate change with emphasis on urgent and ambitious mitigation efforts by rich countries that are thought to be responsible for the course of climate change at least in historical terms. Second, they call for assistance in terms of finance, technology, and capacity-building to help them increase their adaptation to climate impacts. More recently, low carbon development (LCD) and cognate terms like climate compatible development, low emission development strategies (LEDS), and green growth have all become popular in international environmental and sustainable development discourse. Their popularity has stemmed from the notion that they offer a new hope for continued growth in the South while also serving as a soft alternative to hard, quantified GHG emission reduction targets for the developing countries. LCD is also attractive because it appears to hold the promise of reconciling a long and deep conflict between the economic development aspirations of developing countries and the imperative to cut anthropogenic global greenhouse gas emissions that are causing climate change. However, more than 20 years since the negotiation of the UNFCCC, there remains a wide sense of frustration in developing countries that the rich countries are not only denying their obligations to reduce emissions and help poor countries adapt to climate change but that they are surreptitiously conscripting developing countries into undertaking burdensome emission reduction commitments. The Paris Agreement, which comes into effect in 2020, expects all countries (both developed and developing countries) to commit to ambitious emission reduction programs. [p. 328]
  1. At the 2019 UN climate conference, COP25 in Madrid, nearly 27,000 sought to finalize the rulebook of the Paris Agreement. The delegates also aimed to send a strong message of intent, signalling to the wider world that the UN process remains relevant and that it is making a conscious effort to fill the gaps between current progress and global goals to limit warming. Nonetheless, the talks failed to reach a consensus in many areas, including matters such as ambition levels, Article 6, transparency, and timeframes for climate pledges. Concerning ambition levels, some countries were clear from the outset that the conference was to focus on “ambition,” reflecting the gap between current pledges and actions to meet global temperature goals. The call by some countries for greater ambition from all parties is based on the understanding that NDCs in their current form will go nowhere near enough to limit warming to 1.5oC. The tension at the conference also reflected differing interpretations of the word “ambition.” Others, especially India and other countries in the Like-Minded group of Developing Countries (LMDCs), argued for a broader interpretation that included the promised provision of climate finance and actions to increase adaptation and build capacity in poor countries. [p. 329]
  1. Many actors, including UN agencies, other multilateral organizations such as the European Union and US Agency for International Development (USAID), and transnational public-sector institutions and businesses play crucial roles in global climate governance. For example, the climate change sub-program at UNEP focuses on building the capacity of institutions in developing countries so that they can mainstream climate change decisions into national development strategies. These different strategies are principally linked to the broader UNFCC framework for global climate governance. Nonetheless, recent developments in the climate regime have led to a renewed interest in multilateral and transnational partnerships outside the UNFCCC structure. These partnerships, such as the G7 and G8+5, largely seek to address climate issues outside the UNFCCC agenda, while others seek to demonstrate the crucial role multilateral institutions play in addressing global environment–development challenges. It could be that these responses reflect the failures of the UNFCCC to regulate emissions reductions and stimulate an awareness of their importance or to provide adequate funds for adaptation in developing countries. [pp. 328-9]
  1. The earth’s climate can be affected by natural elements that are external to the climate system, such as alterations in volcanic activity, solar output, and the earth’s orbit around the sun. Of these, the two important issues on time scales of present-day climate change are changes in volcanic activity and changes in solar radiation. Climate change can also be caused by human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels and the conversion of land for agriculture and forestry. In addition to other environmental impacts, these activities change the land surface and emit various substances into the atmosphere such as carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas (GHG) that influences the amount of inward and outward energy and, thus, can have both warming and cooling effects on the climate. Climate change exemplifies the intricate connections and tensions between global economic development and environmental sustainability perhaps more than any other environmental issue (Okereke and Schroder 2009). There are at least three points of connection, all of which are of great significance. First, through its severe negative impacts on the natural, human, social, and economic systems of developing countries, climate change could reverse decades of international development efforts and further limit the resources available to fight poverty in both rich and poor countries. Some of the potential impacts of climate change in developing countries include increased frequency and severity of extreme climate events, reduced crop yield causing food insecurity, desertification, ecosystem collapse, fresh water shortages, lower incomes and scant economic growth, population displacement, and exposure to new health risks. [p. 325]
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