Adverse impacts from global climate change on the earth’s ecosystem and human well-being have unequivocally been felt in the last half century. According to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) data from 1970-2004, the earth’s temperature has increased by an average of 0.2 degree Celcius per year.
The years from 2001-2010 have been the warmest 10-year period since the beginning of weather recording in 1850. The heat of the oceans increased in the second half of the 20th century.
Consequently, glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets from the Arctic and Antarctic Oceans have recently been melting, which resulted in a mean sea level rise from -20 centimeter in 1950 to +5 centimeters in 2000.
This year the earth experienced extreme weather, such as a deadly summer heat wave in Russia with temperatures soaring to a record 38.2 degrees Celcius; heavy rains and floods in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Australia; droughts that afflicted the Amazon basin and southwest China; floods that devastated Pakistan; and drastic changes in oceanic and atmospheric conditions in the California Current Ecosystem brought about summertime hypoxia, anoxia and massive fish kills.
If the earth’s temperature cannot be maintained and increases more than 2 degrees Celcius, a number of catastrophes will occur in various parts of the globe. These will include rising sea levels by 1 to 6 meters, which could inundate coastal areas around the world, increased flooding and altered rainfall cycles.
Dry seasons will get longer and wet seasons will be shorter but more intense. Heat waves would be more frequent and dangerous. Shifting weather patterns could destabilize the world’s food supply and access to clean water, and lead to mass migrations as farmers and fishermen flee drought or flood-prone regions.
Global climate change and its concomitant negative impacts has mostly been a result of increasing global emissions of greenhouse gases originating from the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and extreme changes in land use and land cover.
Yet, few nations, except Indonesia, have taken serious action to curb global warming by legally binding themselves to cut greenhouse gas emissions as prescribed by the IPCC.
According to the IPCC, if we were to avoid unmanageable catastrophes from global warming, the emissions rate of greenhouse gases should be cut by 25-40 percent in 2020 and 50 percent in 2050 from 1990 levels. Developed countries should reduce their emissions by 80 percent by 2050.
During the 2009 COP-15 conference in Denmark, President Yudhoyono pledged Indonesia would reduce carbon emissions by 26 percent from the business-as-usual estimate of emissions in 2020.
Unfortunately, Indonesia’s heroic commitment has not enticed other nations, particularly the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases, the US and China, to follow suit.
Rich nations like those in Europe, the US, Japan and Australia are reluctant to slash their greenhouse gas emissions because emerging nations with high economic growth in the last 15 years, especially China and India, have not legally committed to reducing their carbon emissions. In the meantime, developing and poor nations are worried that cutting emissions could hamper economic growth they badly need to deal with unemployment and poverty.
Such rationales, from both rich and poor nations, are depicted in Garret Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” story, which applies to almost all common-property resources.
In the story, a group of medieval English herders keep increasing the size of their individual herds, eventually exceeding the capacity of the village commons with everyone losing their entire herds.
At the time Hardin’s paper was published in 1968, many people found the “tragedy” metaphor insightful and applicable to the world’s fisheries. Fisheries provide a telling example of the common dilemma: The resource is fragile, and the fish you do not catch today may be caught by someone else tomorrow.
But since each fisherman operates with the same rationale, the users of the fishery-common resource are caught in an inevitable process that leads to the extinction of the very resource on which they all depend. Because each user ignores the cost imposed on others, individually rational decisions accumulate to result in a socially irrational outcome.
It is therefore timely for all citizens and governments of the world to join hands to significantly
cut greenhouse gas emissions. Although stabilizing atmospheric CO2 levels is a staggering challenge, it is certainly doable.
Recent environmentally friendly technological innovations in forestry, agriculture and fisheries and in mining, transportation, energy and industrial processes have made it possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as recommended by the IPCC and, at the same time, maintain economic growth.
With advances in wind turbine design, more efficient solar cells, geothermal, bio-energy and fuel cells, we now have the basic technologies needed to shift quickly from a carbon-based to a hydrogen-based energy economy. The fuel cell is a device powered by hydrogen and uses an electro-chemical process to convert hydrogen into electricity, water vapor and heat.
Hydrogen can come from many sources, including the electrolysis of water or the reformulation of natural gas or gasoline, a process that extracts the hydrogen from hydrocarbons. If the hydrogen comes from water, then electricity from any source can be used to electrolyze the water. If the electricity comes from a wind farm, hydropower stations, geothermal power stations or solar cells, the hydrogen will be clean and produced without carbon emissions or air pollutants.
Curbing global carbon emissions by 25-40 percent by 2020 and 50 percent by 2050 is definitely within range. Ambitious though this might seem, it is commensurate with the threat that climate change poses to our earth and civilization.
The writer is a professor at the Center for Coastal and Marine Resource Studies at Bogor Institute
of Agriculture.
