By Syed Ali
In the post-COVID world, green financial recovery has garnered substantial consideration as a win-win approach to stay away from the worst dangers of the climate crisis. Climate alter is the defining crisis of our time triggered by the heating of the planet due to the ever-growing carbon emissions into the atmosphere. In the post-COVID era, we want a cohesive trifecta of national, regional, and worldwide decarbonisation plans with transparent reporting, monitoring, and evaluation mechanisms. Lack thereof will vastly stymie development ambitions such as poverty alleviation, access to drinking water, electrical energy, and shelter in the emerging and creating economies, subsequently producing new multi-dimensional complications in just about every productive segment of our society. However, following a time-based multi-sectorial and multilateral strategy eliminating carbon emissions may well reverse and restore the climate alter-induced damages on our lived environments.
In accordance with the Paris Agreement target warming of the planet beyond 2°C (pre-industrial levels) will trigger extreme and irreversible environmental damages. The warming of the planet is triggered due to Carbon’s propensity to hold heat for a longer duration growing worldwide temperature irreversibly. This improve in worldwide temperatures signifies critical dangers for ecological systems along with substantial adverse impacts on all the living organisms like our personal species. As a outcome of climate alter we are witnessing widespread environmental catastrophes urban droughts, disrupted climate cycles affecting agricultural yields, soil erosion, increasing sea levels, super-cyclones, forest fires, acidification of oceans, and comparable events threatening the really existence of life on our planet.
Ameliorating such environmental deterioration needs a national strategy of action for the decarbonisation of our production and provide chain infrastructure. The decarbonisation strategy entails a extended-term approach focusing on weaning off greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions mostly carbon dioxide for the reason that of its huge share (76%) inside the atmosphere. As of now, only 29 nations have submitted their ‘long-term low greenhouse gas emission development strategies to the UNFCCC secretariat in accordance with the Paris agreement that obliged all parties to submit their plans by 2020. Additionally, this year will witness two important events in climate diplomacy; COP 26 in Glasgow UK and the review of the Paris agreement’s member states ‘nationally determined contributions’ (NDC) submitted to UNFCCC.
According to the Emission gaps report (2020) of the UNEP, the world is headed for a catastrophic 3°c temperature rise way beyond the Paris agreements beneath the 2 °C objective. Therefore, this tends to make the COP 26 a ‘make or break’ summit to rejuvenate the worldwide consensus on emission reduction. Unfortunately, the list of nations with a extended-term decarbonisation approach does not consist of the top rated emitters China, the USA, and India respectively, accountable for more than half of the worldwide CO2 emissions. Singapore is the only Asian nation out of the total 29 nations to have submitted a extended-term emission reduction approach to decarbonize its economy.
India is the 5th most vulnerable nation to climate dangers with its intense poor being the worst impacted. In 2020, out of the ten most pricey climate alter events, two had been in India Amphan the super cyclone, and the October floods in the NE area of India, profusely costing the economy. Even worse, India is home to 9 out of the 10 most polluted cities in the world and this trend extends to the complete South Asian continent that has 49 out of 50 most polluted cities in the world. Pollution is a expanding Asian trouble, which desires an urgent regional strategy that can contribute towards decreasing worldwide temperatures. At this juncture, a holistic and forceful decarbonization approach explicitly formulating milestones to scaling clean transportation, infrastructure, power, and agriculture at low charges by way of innovation is urgently required.
With the re-entry of the USA in the Paris agreement, substantial methods have been made towards emission reduction. The USA has committed to decreasing 26-28 % of its emissions by 2030 and net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. India has constituted an apex committee for the Implementation of the Paris agreement. China in its current 14th ‘ five-year plan has laid out the roadmap for ‘carbon neutrality by 2060, with an immediate reduction of 18% and 13.5% CO2 and energy intensity, respectively from 2021 to 2025 levels.
Quantifying the amount of innovation required to replace all polluting technologies with cleaner sources is a daunting task. Innovation is at the center of our fight against climate change and for this reason, we need proactive International alliances on climate innovation across sectors especially the scientific community. During the Paris agreement (2016), a coalition of 24 countries + European Commission launched the ‘Mission Innovation’ to foster and assistance the financing of greener technologies, and double the public investment in R&D of clean power. Most importantly, we want to focus on climate literacy to extract human ingenuity from wherever probable comparable to the development of COVID-vaccine in record time. As Bill Gates articulates in his current book, ‘How to avoid a climate disaster’, “Solving global warming would be “the most amazing thing humanity has done”.
(The author is an independent analyst on Latin American and Sustainability affairs. Views expressed are individual and do not reflect the official position or policy of TheSpuzz Online. Twitter: @Alinyst)