A Global TAX on Emissions?

The original estimate of participants at the UNFCC was 10,000, the largest in its history. That number has now been exceeded. Yesterday the registration desk ran out of badges. A world of interests is showing up on the UN’s doorstep here in Bali.

Adaptation issues are now vying for center stage with emission reduction strategies. How shall the world’s most vulnerable people, the $1 a day poor, survive the climate effects brought to them by first world excess?

Remember the popular advertisement: “We’ll leave the light on for you?”

 In today’s context, it might remind instead: “Lights OFF after 10 PM.”

 

If you’ve ever seen satellite images taken of city lights around the world at night … you’ll understand how easy it would be cut global C02 emissions dramatically, and literally…, overnight.

 

Adaptation issues have come late into the negotiation process. In the past, the focus of conference participants was on mitigation: how to identify and reduce greenhouse gas emissions of rich nations. Now that people from the world’s least polluting nations are beginning to experience the physical effects of climate change, adaptation issues are moving into the spotlight.

Should people living in rich nations pay for the basic survival needs of people displaced by climate change impacts? These impacts include a need for fresh water and food due to lack of rainfall and loss of crops, and displacement due to rising sea levels.

 

In Cape Verde, a chain of islands just west of Africa, where America claimed some of its first slaves – and discovered the Hip Hop -  there has been only one rainfall on three of the 10 islands this year, and none on the rest. This is unexpected. The people are unprepared. Surrounded by water, these island people are experiencing a shortage of drinking water.

 

Across the world, in West Timor and around the small island states of Indonesia, deforestation has caused rapid runoff of water and soil, leaving foul, polluted nearly dry streams where fish cannot survive. Ngedikes Olai U. Polloi, climate change coordinator for the Office of Environmental Response and Coordination and other advocates are drawing world attention to the needs of these newly displaced people.

 

It’s Disaster Economics 101: someone will profit from this loss. Someone will supply fresh water in bottles. Someone will build temporary shelters. Someone will consult on the problem. This displaced will receive promises. And first world consumption will continue.

 

Worldwide, the water is already rising. Environmental refugees, who have moved inland on small islands to squat on the land of others, must boil unripe fruits for hours in order to feed their children. However, this unripe fruit makes them sick. Complicating their plight, reduced rainfall in the region has forced the landowner to till the soil to produce more food for their own children. The refugee families must move again.

 

Oxfam is a non-profit organization that is working in 100 countries to provide long term development and advocacy for people who are the most vulnerable. Its Australian representative, Charlotte Sterrett says that while rich nations have pledged $163 million to help support these newly emerging adaptation needs, only $67 million has been delivered. Adaptation, she reminds, is about people whose daily focus is now on basic survival.

 

When people are forced to leave an area due to the unexpected forces of climate change, they are not producing. Food is not being put on the table. Life cannot survive here. Human suffering is an indicator. Their loss is accompanied by loss of biodiversity and species extinction. In Greenland, a repository is being set up to save heirloom seeds around the world.

 

In adaptation sessions, there is talk of a Global Tax – a 2% fee that could be extracted from polluters and applied to the poor. The emerging needs of the poor, displaced by climate change is as new to most conference participants as the term Environmental Refugees. All agree, money must be found to help them.

 

This weekend two key events will take center stage. The first is a two-day event on Development and Climate organized by IIED, IISD, SEI and RING. The second, is World Forest Day. I’ll attend both and report on key solutions.