Why and how we need to act on climate change now

Tomorrow is the International Day of Climate Action. On this day, millions of people around the globe take action in their communities. The call is for world leaders to sign a strong climate agreement in Copenhagen.

It is difficult to think about something more urgent than a global agreement that brings down greenhouse gases. We are rapidly reaching what climate scientists call tipping point. At such point, our enormous carbon pollution triggers positive feedbacks that unravel the planet’s climate system despite any subsequent carbon reductions achieved by humanity.

Scientists have identified several dangerous feedbacks. One is the albedo flip. When ice melts and turns to water, it causes further heating, because water absorbs heat and ice reflects heat. So, melting begets more melting. Just two years ago, scientists made a stunning prediction that the Arctic might be free of summer ice by 2040. Within a year they revised that date to somewhere between 2010 and 2015 because the ice sheets were collapsing so fast.

Until two years ago, scientists had thought that the tipping point was somewhere around 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but when the polar ice caps started collapsing in 2007, Nasa scientist Jim Hansen concluded the tipping point must be around 350 parts per million. Currently, we are at 387 and climbing faster than ever before. If there is a number we all need to remember from now on, it is 350 (www.350.org).

That world leaders aim for 350 is a matter of highest priority. For once, citizens expect the decision-making elite to put their economic games aside and actually do what they have been elected for, that is to govern. Essentially, climate change is the result of failure of governance. Under the current system of environmental statutes and regulations the issue of carbon reductions is one of discretion, not necessity.

That is the problem. Environmental law is crippled by an enormous dysfunction, and if we fail to address this dysfunction, we will look for solutions in a system that brought us the ecological crisis in the first place.

There is a massive gap between promise and implementation. The purpose of environmental law – whether international, national or local – is to protect the environment. The same law, however, allows agencies to permit, in their discretion, the very pollution and damage of the environment that it sets out to prevent. Public agencies spend most of their time to permit, rather than prevent, environmental destruction. By acting on behalf of citizens, our agencies have used the discretion in the law to systematically destroy the natural environment, including its atmosphere.

Individual consumers and house owners want their property rights protected in much the same way as commercial companies want theirs protected. The difference may be one of scale not one of principle. Hence blaming “the industry” or “the government” won’t fix the problem. The problem sits deeper.

The crux is the dual nature of private property rights. They are an important part of our individual freedom and indispensable as such, but they are also threatening our very existence as humans, collectively and individually. As nature has no rights, there is, at present, no legal mechanism to counter the disastrous effects of property rights.

The much-talked about “tragedy of the commons” is, therefore, that governments unintentionally, yet knowingly allow private property rights to destroy the commons – our atmosphere, our oceans, our rainforests, our land and livelihood. I say “knowingly” as governments have designed environmental laws around protecting individual property instead of protecting the commons. And I say “our” as the commons belong to all of us; they are common property superior to private property rights.

Tomorrow’s International Day of Action will hardly make a difference to the intentions of governments. States will send their delegations to Copenhagen to negotiate a deal that everyone can live with.

The Action Day can, however, make a difference to the rest of us. We citizens must lead by example to cause our so-called “leaders” to follow. They must learn that no one can alter the laws of nature and that no economic concerns can ever create the mandate to compromise the planet’s integrity.

In legal terms, states and governments need to work towards a trusteeship or guardianship concept of the commons. Citizens are guardians for the commons that they need to pass on to the future. Perceived in this way, common property sets limits to private property. This goes of course to the core of capitalism. Should that frighten us? No, not if we are serious about stopping dangerous climate change.

Prof. Bosselmann is director, New Zealand Centre for Environmental Law University of Auckland and Visiting Fellow of the University of Malta.