Business has no excuse for climate change inaction

Bob Doppelt

"High carbon growth kills itself.” Those were the word of Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief economist with the World Bank, at the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change I attended in March 2009 in Copenhagen. Stern’s comment pithily summarized the findings of the more than 2,500 scientists from 80 countries that participated in the event.

The Congress was held to provide world leaders attending the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen slated for December 2009 with the most up-to-date scientific information about climate change. COP 15, as the upcoming UN meeting is called, is intended to hammer out a new international agreement to reduce climate-damaging carbon emissions. The existing international agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, has failed to slash emissions. A new accord is urgently needed to set the world on a safe path.

The six key messages government officials will receive from the science congress are at once unnerving and optimistic—and they have major implications for business.

The first relates to observed climate trends. The Congress concluded that the most harmful of the scenarios described in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report are being realized. New research revealed at the meeting shows that global temperatures are on a path to rise by at least 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit—or worse—by the end of this century.

Although Nicholas Stern and a few other luminaries have said that if society acts quickly, temperature increases could be held to 3.6o F, no scientist I spoke with at the Congress exuberated such confidence.

This view was reaffirmed after the conference ended. In April the Guardian newspaper in London polled the scientists that attended the Congress about their views of the possibility that temperatures would rise no further than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Nine out of 10 of the respondents said they thought temperatures would exceed that level, and most thought we would experience a rise by 6 degrees to 9 degrees Fahrenheit in this century.

As the Earth warms, droughts, floods, heat waves and other extreme weather events will become more frequent. In addition, scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research shared research showing that sea levels now seem all but certain to rise by at least 3 feet by the century’s end and continue rising after that. Most disconcerting, the Congress concluded that we face “an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climate shifts.”

These findings led to the meeting’s second key conclusion: Rising temperatures are already causing and will produce increasingly larger social, political and economic disruptions. Millions of people will be forced to flee coastal areas flooded by rising sea levels. Millions more will migrate from drought- and flood-stricken regions of the world. Wildfires and other dislocations will batter still others as the century unfolds.

Closely linked with the second conclusion is the finding that climate change is causing disproportional impacts on the poor and most vulnerable among and within societies, and this trend will grow.

It was these initial findings that led Nicholas Stern, who led the British government’s review of the global economic impacts of climate change, to say that high carbon growth kills itself. We now know that using fossil fuels to power our economies is self-destructive.
To avoid the worst of these impacts, the science congress concluded that “rapid, sustained and effective” reductions in carbon emissions must be achieved.

Emissions must be slashed by 80 percent or more in the United States, and other industrialized nations have a responsibility to do the same. Importantly, because the risks of triggering tipping points in the Earth’s climate increase every year, cuts made in the immediate future—that is, the next 1 year to 5 years—are more important than those made in 2020 or later in the century. In short, we must get on with it now. 

All segments of society must also, however, begin to prepare for the climatic changes that are now inevitable. This means building resistance and resiliency to climate change.

The fifth finding of the Scientific Congress on Climate Change provides an optimistic note and is aimed directly at citizens, businesses, and policymakers—not just those attending the UN climate change summit in December, but also senior officials and leaders within every sector globally: “There is no excuse for inaction.”

Most of the tools, technologies and behavioral change mechanisms needed to decarbonize the economy and avoid runaway climate change already exist. In addition, decarbonization will produce benefits such as demand for new low and carbon-free products and services, job growth, improved public health and healthier ecological systems.

In short, the Scientific Congress on Climate Change found that we know how to cut emissions and to prepare for climate change and doing so will benefit everyone—there is no excuse for delay.

Of course, numerous obstacles stand in our way. This is the sixth and final key finding of the Scientific Congress on Climate Change. To reduce the risks of runaway climate change and capture the opportunities provided by the shift to a low-carbon economy, we must make pointed efforts to overcome fear as well as sclerosis in our thinking, behaviors, culture, economic systems, governance mechanisms and leadership.

It seems to me that the bottom line from the Congress is that neither our current financial troubles nor any other issue are sufficient reasons for delaying emission reductions or preparing for climate change. The world is teetering on the brink of disastrous and irreversible climatic changes. We should of course use the most efficiency and effective tools possible. But, in many ways it does not matter what it costs. We must rise above our current difficulties solve this problem before it is too late.

Bob Doppelt is the director of the Resource Innovations program and the Climate Leadership Initiative at the University of Oregon. This is the first in a regular series of columns about the adjustments—and change strategies—firms will need to make to succeed in a carbon-constrained world. Contact Bob at bob@sustainableindustries.com.