The Inequalities of Climate Change
By Harper Edhels
December 2020
Despite being a global issue, you would be misguided to assume that climate change is a global leveller.
Less developed countries with the lowest carbon footprints are shouldering the burden of the developed world’s emissions. As highlighted by a 2019 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, food insecurity is one of the gravest results of climate change, which acutely affects countries in the Global South that are vulnerable to temporal fluctuations such as droughts and floods. In fact, the IPCC warns that if global warming creeps above 2°c, the pressure on food systems in the Global South is likely to tip over the edge as fertile land turns to desert and recurrent droughts become the norm.
The responsibility for these effects is no more equally distributed than the effects themselves. A recent study pinned 92% of historic carbon dioxide emissions on the most industrialised countries spanning the Global North, including the UK, the US, and countries across the European Union. The study examined each country’s ‘fair share’ of carbon budget based on its population, finding that most countries in the Global South were within their fair shares, including rapidly developing India and China.
Climate change also feeds into a spiral of inequality, where greenhouse gas-induced climate change has ‘enriched cool countries like Norway and Sweden while dragging down economic growth in warm countries such as India and Nigeria’. It’s estimated that there is a 90% likelihood that GDP per capita is lower in most countries in the global south than if global warming had not occurred.
The Roots of Asymmetry
Understanding the lingering system of inequality that has followed us into the postcolonial era is critical to understanding the current state of play in climate affairs. Rewind 70 years, and the post-Second World War period had just ushered in a wave of decolonisation movements across the southern hemisphere. The majority of the newly independent member states of the UN joined between 1945-65 during the decolonisation process, embodying a hopeful counterweight to the political overrepresentation of countries in the Global North. Institutions such as the Non-Aligned Movement, expressing developing countries’ neutrality in the face of Cold War tensions, and the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which gave oil-producing states leverage over their oil-guzzling counterparts in the Global North, started to spring up.
Yet the global power imbalance between nations persisted, as developed countries continued to control the rules of the game. They started to respond to their diminishing power in international institutions by simply withdrawing from them, such as the US withdrawal from UNESCO in 1985, arguing that too much money was being wasted. The formation of G7 (the US, the UK, Japan, Germany, France, Canada and Italy), despite the initial ostensible premise of managing macroeconomic affairs, has over time allowed the 7 industrialised nations to present a united front against the rest of the world. The G7 forum possesses more than 62% of global net wealth, and represents yet another table at which less economically developed countries are not invited to sit.
The Legacy of Power Inequalities
Skip forwards to 2017, and Trump is announcing that the United States would be withdrawing from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation due to the alleged unfair impact of its terms on the US. The withdrawal means as much normatively as it does financially; alongside the termination of $3 billion in funding that will no longer flow from the US into climate research, it also epitomises the detachment of actors in the Global North from climate change effects that do not directly impact them.
Even actors vying for positive change are prone to misguided policies. There is a clear North-South divide in opinion over what it means to solve climate change equitably. Whereas discussion in the Northern Hemisphere is predominantly around allocating emissions targets, in the Southern Hemisphere the principal concern is the inequity between those with the responsibility for climate change and those who shoulder the burden of it. Whilst the agenda of climate conferences such as COP7 and UNFCCC continue to be dictated by the agenda set by the industrialised world, focusing on allocating emissions targets rather than the human welfare problem at stake, their success can only be limited.
At a UN Second Committee meeting in October 2019, a group of delegates predominantly made up of nations in the Global South collectively acknowledged that climate change was the one of the greatest threats facing our world today - and its adverse impact on developing countries was severely undermining their ability to achieve sustainable development in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
It’s been argued that colonialism is not just about formal governance or economic dependency, but a dominance maintained by power asymmetry. For all the modern global community’s claims of equitable politics, the systemic imbalance of power persists. It’s time for us to decolonise climate discussions and redress the inequalities of power that have dominated the agenda until now. As Seth Myers, author of a study on the global injustice of the climate crisis, puts it: "There is no excuse for not acting with the utmost urgency when it's our emissions of the wealthy world that are putting the poorest people on the planet in harm's way."
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