Filed under: Climate Change and South Asia | Tags: Bangladesh, Climate Change, India, SAARC, South Asia
South Asian environment ministers met in Dhaka last week and hammered out a declaration calling for greater cooperation and unity in addressing climate change in the region. The Dhaka Declaration, announced from the forum of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation includes a climate change action plan which, among other things, envisions greater collaboration in disaster preparedness and responses in the SAARC region.
While the idea of a common SAARC platform on climate change may be one that appeals to the ideals of regional solidarity and integration, it looks likely that on the area of climate change, as with trade, Bangladesh may stand to gain very little by joining together with a developing nation like India whose priorities and agenda in international negotiations are contradictory to our own. We as Bangladeshis have justifiable reason to be aggrieved that the SAARC Dhaka Declaration on climate change fails to address one of the most significant aspects of global warming i.e. the task of mitigations or cuts in the emissions of greenhouse gases. The likely reason, the SAARC document bypasses this issue, is because India – one of the most powerful players in the SAARC forum – wants to avoid addressing its own responsibilities in cutting emissions. In fact, not only did the document fail to mention that this was one area where the SAARC members could not agree, the Chief Adviser to the military-controlled interim government only mentioned that it was the developed countries who had the responsibility of carrying out mitigation efforts.
True, all the countries in the SAARC region are essentially victims of climate change caused by the indiscriminate use of fossil fuels by the industrialised countries of the North. As a region the extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, heat waves and cyclones that we are likely to encounter with increasing frequency and intensity ties these neighbouring countries in a common thread. The Maldives and Bangladesh are likely to see large swathes of its landmass inundated with rising sea levels, Nepal will likely face receding glaciers and glacial-lake outburst floods with increasing frequency, large swathes of India will see desertification and loss of crop yields, while others will see too much rain. And yet, speaking objectively, Bangladesh is better off building rapport with the other members of the group of Least Developed Countries that it has led and chaired at UN negotiations on climate change, with India negotiating as a member of the Developing Countries group. One of the reasons is that India, unlike Bangladesh, believes that the developing countries e.g itself, Brazil and China have the right to develop and industrialise as the West has done, before they commit to emissions cuts of greenhouse gases. In fact this has been the principal strategy that the US and India and China have almost used in tandem to undermine the emissions caps that the 1997 Kyoto Protocol mandated. While the US, under the Bush administration, refused to come on board citing the protocol’s exemption granted to developing countries to emit without caps until 2012, India and China have consistently demanded that the West cannot deny them the same opportunities to develop and emerge out of poverty as they had.
For Bangladesh – especially its technocrats and scientists – it is important to understand two things very clearly. Firstly, Bangladesh’s profile as a victim of climate change is fast peaking, and if it is to extract a reasonably beneficial outcome from the yet to be decided content of the successor to the Kyoto Protocol for a post-2012 era, it must be careful not to alienate other LDC countries by pandering to bilateral interests. Today, India is the fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, in absolute terms, with China occupying top spot. If the developing countries do continue emitting at the current rate, for say, a few more decades, it may not be enough for Bangladesh’s survival that developed countries cut emissions drastically. As scientists have repeatedly warned, global warming should be seen as a massive ship whose direction cannot be changed easily; a ship that continues to move for a while on momentum even after the engines have been switched off. For Bangladesh which is expected to be worst affected by a sea level rise, will it matter that the emissions that caused global warming originated in India rather than the US? Hardly.
The second important point that the Bangladesh government should recognise is that the strategy of saying different things at different forums in a bid to earn applause is not as harmless as it seems. When the chief adviser to the military-controlled interim government, Dr Fakhruddin Ahmed spoke at a high level meeting in the US last September, he said, ‘Scientists have long warned us that a ‘business as usual’ approach will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Drastic measures are now required. Unless we stem the tide of emissions, the increase in global temperatures and sea levels may accelerate. We urge all major emitters to collectively establish and implement a global target to stabilize the atmosphere over the short, medium and long term.’ This was perfectly in line with Bangladesh and its LDC colleagues’ position that all major emitters regardless of their economic status must accept responsibility for emissions cuts. But when Ahmed inaugurated the SAARC ministers’ meet earlier this month, the emphasis was on the industrialised West providing adequate funds for adaptation, with no mention of the emitters’ mitigation responsibilities, as reported in the media. Bangladesh is one of the most high profile stakeholders in the outcome of climate change negotiations. Until now it has failed to use this to its advantage, and has equally failed to espouse a consistent political position on the issue at UN negotiations, mostly because our strategy on climate change is largely determined by technocrats without any participation from public representatives.
Because of the technical nature of the subject, and the fact that it is only coming into prominence now, climate change has been an issue which has had very little currency in the political arena. This has perhaps suited the NGOs working with climate change in Bangladesh better than they had expected, with the national agenda on climate change hijacked by a fast expanding group of foreign and local NGOs. While this is not necessarily a negative reality, given that most of the expertise on climate change has been developed at the non-governmental level, and most of the noise on Bangladesh’s plight has, without a doubt, been created by them, the time has come to widen the mandate on what Bangladesh’s international position should be. For this to happen, it is the government that needs to start building understanding and opinion on climate change from the bottom up. We must recognise the resonance that this opinion-building exercise will have amongst rural, agrarian, communities across Bangladesh, who are sensing more than any of us, and without the aid of scientific reports, that climate variability is increasing and wreaking havoc on the agricultural calendar. It is not enough for an elite team of Bangladeshis to understand climate change and negotiate well at the international level. Ordinary Bangladeshis have a right to know why their crop yields are falling, floods are increasing, rainfall is erratic and the dry season becoming drier but warmer. And they have a right to know what their government is doing about it. Climate change is no longer the exclusive terrain of the scientists – as its effects are being felt, the mandate for action must be widened through its emergence as a political issue rather than a scientific one.
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