Environment Minister José Herrera recently announced that Malta’s internal processes paving the way to the ratification of the Paris Climate Agreement are at an advanced stage. The announcement came during a Brussels meeting at which the minister and his Slovak counterpart exchanged views about the joint ratification by the EU well ahead of the stipulated timeframe established in the treaty.

This development arises in the aftermath of what many observers consider as a crucial milestone in the success of the Paris Treaty, that of the world’s two biggest emitters – China and the US – having both ratified the agreement in recent days. Latest data from the UNFCCC Secretariat shows that China and the US alone account for 20 per cent and 18 per cent respectively of all global greenhouse gas emissions.

These amounts have to be gauged in the light of the so-called Article 21 ‘double trigger’ of the Paris Agreement, providing that the treaty would enter into force “on the 30th day after the date on which at least 55 parties to the Convention accounting in total for at least an estimated 55 per cent of the total global greenhouse gas emissions have deposited their instruments of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession”.

According to Climate Analytics the current state of play is that 27 country parties have ratified as on September 9, while another 32 have already signalled that they intend to do so by the end of the year. All summed up, this would cover an estimated 59.9 per cent of global emissions by 59 countries implying that the new climate treaty could easily enter into force much earlier than originally expected.

It would send a resounding message that the global community is not only seriously concerned about the climate issue but that there is recognition about the need to act urgently in the wake of what risks becoming global economic disaster. The key players have long digested the crux of the issue: the dimensions of climate change are not restricted environmental harm but the issue is essentially economic and where the well-being of nations and the safety of planet for present and future generations come into play.

It took a long and winding road for the COP21 agreement to be reached. The world has changed considerably since the times of the Kyoto Protocol when only the industrialised economies and those in transition – mainly those countries in the fall-out of the ex-Soviet bloc – had conceded to commit to an emission reductions regime in the order of five per cent to below 1990 levels.

As the first commitment period under Kyoto drew to a close in 2012 and successive COPs had established arrangements for a second such period that however could not be durable beyond 2020, it became apparent, particularly after Copenhagen, that an innovative political mechanism was needed. Otherwise the global climate process was doomed to fail.

The answer stood in an approach opposite to that adopted in Kyoto; rather than having a pre-set target and channel the global political effort towards achieving it, a bottom-up approach was needed that was more consonant with the new world order. Country parties were requested to draw up their own specific Intended National Determined Contributions (INDCs) such that a clear statement would be available to the UN about the maximum amount of GHG reductions that could be achieved by each within stipulated timeframes taking into account respective socio-economic considerations.

Malta is synonymous with the global climate challenge: it was us who triggered the process in 1989 through the landmark initiative at the UN General Assembly

Concurrently the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its much awaited Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) that not only put the state of global climate into perspective from a purely scientific standpoint but also led to an understanding that, worryingly, the required collective effort to keep the planet safe exceeded what all the INDCs combined could provide.

In the background was the 2006 Stern Review that had assessed the economic implications of climate change; economic modelling had shown that whereas the costs of climate mitigation and adaptation could be manageable at this point in time, the costs would escalate in future and it was indispensable to take action now.

The complexity of the climate issue stems from its intrinsic relationship with energy use and the need for sustainable lifestyles. A global economic shift is required, one that moves from the high carbon world of today to low-carbon, to contain carbon emissions to within the 20C temperature rise above pre-industrial. It does not mean however that the Paris Treaty advocates the immediate shut down of fossil fuel power plants as if there was some straightforward answer such as with renewable energy technologies alone.

There is no question that the global energy mix needs to be diversified but a key aspect of the Paris treaty is the understanding of its Article 4 (1): “To achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions from sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century.”

The implications go beyond the need for more widespread afforestation projects to enhance the capacity of sinks. In fact, the treaty paves the way for new carbon capture technologies the development of which is still embryonic that would technically permit continued fossil fuel burning.

That this ought to be achieved “in the second half of this century” is indicative of the broad timeframe across which the various provisions in the treaty are designed to be implemented.

Technological quick fixes alone will however not be enough to keep the planet safe and it would neither suffice to rely on efforts by governments to support a green economic shift. What is surely needed is a momentum that brings about a change in human behaviour towards more sustainable lifestyles that drift away from the high-carbon economics.

The global economic model has to be adjusted to internalise the climate market failure to such an extent that price indicators are made more realistic to reflect, truly, the full social costs incurred with fossil fuel use.

The global carbon price debate now features well in mainstream economics. Whether this can be achieved through carbon taxation, emissions trading or both is a purely technical matter but two things are fairly clear: firstly, that as the EU emissions trading scheme has shown a serious evaluation is needed to ensure the proper capping of carbon emissions to avoid permit allocation gluts that would ultimately collapse any carbon trading system and, secondly, any carbon tax regime must be socially equitable that shifts the burden of taxation from labour to pollution.

There are enormous complexities behind these arguments that cannot be taken in isolation of the national and global macroeconomies.

Malta is synonymous with the global climate challenge: it was us who triggered the process in 1989 through the landmark initiative at the UN General Assembly. Malta’s energy sector is now undergoing a major overhaul to shift to natural gas firing, an indispensable step towards a low-carbon shift.

Malta has also enacted a national legal framework, the Climate Action Act that specifically binds government on climate, achieving the targets and ensuring the regular update of mitigation and adaptation policies and their proper implementation. Remarkably for a small island state as ours, the Act also provides for a climate fund.

We still have a long way to go and there can be no exoneration of international obligations on grounds that we are technically at the receiving end of the global climate problem. Malta has enshrined its low-carbon vision in the National Environment Policy, that by 2020 we should be well underway to achieve a low-carbon, zero-waste society by 2050.

Challenging but doable. Essentially, a matter of political will.

sapulis@gmail.com

Alan Pulis specialises in environmental management.

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