THE POLITICS OF MITIGATION: TOO WEAK, TOO SLOW

Few can forget the comical, yet alarming image of US senator Jim Inhofe brandishing a snowball in the Capitol to mock the scientific community’s assertion that 2014 had become the hottest year in modern historical times— a fact that was attributed to the trend of growing greenhouse gas emissions and consequent global warming. Although Senator Inhofe’s argument may have seemed ridiculous and sheer irrational, it was consistent with the opinions of a large spectrum of Americans — ranging from the rural poor to corporate elites. According to a survey by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, 48% of Americans in 2014 were not worried about global warming and its effects, with 18% denying that it was even occurring. With such a contentious divide on the issue of climate change, the American political sphere is ridden with systemic and institutional barriers to effective implementation of climate change mitigation policies. Underlying this political divide is a framework of vested private interests, with fossil fuel industries serving as the core sponsor for the narrative of climate change skepticism. As an example, the Koch family, deriving its wealth from trade in fossil fuels, had alone spent over $145 million in funding climate change denial groups between 1997 and 2018. Such corporate-driven efforts can and have translated into political inaction against climate change mitigation efforts, and in an extreme case, led to the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement in 2017 under President Trump’s administration.

Of course, the US is not alone in suffering a climate policy deadlock due to political polarization — climate change denial has found firm footing across the globe and even in countries especially vulnerable to climate change, such as Brazil and Australia. Brazilian premier Jair Bolsonaro made headlines as he played down the extent of the Amazonian forest fires in 2019, while he simultaneously sought to relax environmental regulations on business. Then Australian treasurer Scott Morrison, who is now Prime Minister, similarly gained notoriety for passing around a hunk of coal in the House of Representatives in 2017 as he stressed the critical importance of the fossil fuel industry for the nation’s economy.

Across the world, public opinion on climate change is skewed along partisan, ideological lines, with political orientation being the most prominent predictor of one’s climate change worldview. Political polarization then plays out on the policy field by slowing down mitigation efforts — meanwhile increasing the risk of climate change causing irreversible damages to our plant. As such, while many parts of the world continue to debate the very existence of climate change, poor and highly vulnerable countries continue to struggle with the ravaging effects of global warming that have already given rise to the frequency and intensity of natural disasters. Climate change mitigation efforts are decidedly troubled by the issue of exacting trans-national responsibility for climate preservation, given that minimizing climate change’s effects requires global concerted action against polluters and pollutants in every form. To local actors in wealthier and relatively low climate-risk countries, however, mitigation policies may appear to be a trade-off against economic growth, and as such, offer little appeal in urgency. As put by Jonathan Park, “In the context of neoliberal capitalism and cost-benefit analysis, mitigation is a horrible investment because it does not offer a precise, quantifiable return.”

The next recourse is to turn away from controversial and somewhat ineffective mitigation-centered policy premises and to embrace climate change adaptation (CCA) measures. In contrast to mitigation policies, which stress minimizing or reversing the effects of global warming largely by curbing greenhouse-gas emissions, adaptation measures are devoted to reducing “the biophysical, social, and economic vulnerability… of a given area, organization, population group, or individuals to climate change.” This involves the development of hard and soft infrastructures, such as flood barriers and institutions that improve local-national policy co-ordination. The benefits to be derived from adaptation are visibly and directly available to the adapting community, and as such, adaptation policies — at least in theory— circumvent many of the political challenges faced by mitigation efforts. Of course, adaption has its friends and foes in the political sphere, and the remainder of this article is devoted to sketching out some of these political barriers to climate change adaptation.

The Politics of Adaption: None the Better(?)

Adaptation measures require a bottom-up method of implementation: regional actors and agencies are best-suited to identifying the core areas of climate vulnerability in their respective regions. Nevertheless, adaption policies have largely been framed at the national or federal levels in conjunction with international guidelines such as the UNFCCC’s National Adaption Programmes of Action (NAPA) — which asks national governments of so-called Least Developed Countries to submit an action plan for climate adaptation policies, enabling them to receive financial and technical assistance from a dedicated Least Developed Countries Fund. National and international policy-makers, however, “tend to work with an expansive notion of climate vulnerability, without recognizing how this may vary across climate stressors and across different geographical and social contexts,” and thus, tend to develop generalized and broadly focused action plans that are lacking in localized specificity.

Working up from the local level, on the other hand, is beset with its own difficulties. For one, local governance units may not have the administrative capacity or depth required to develop effective climate adaptation plans, and in any case, may end up feuding with centralized ministries for control over important resources. Such is the case in Nepal, which attempted to subvert the generality problem of CCA by setting up Local Adaptation Programmes of Action (LAPA)that are dedicated to improving national-to-local policy co-ordination. LAPA workers, however, claim that there is little communication with the NAPA leaders, largely because frequent power struggles in Nepal’s central bureaucracy prevent the very appointment of NAPA leaders. At the local level, political parties compete for LAPA project contracts, sometimes even violently. NGOs and private citizens similarly enter the fray to win LAPA contracts, often despite lacking the required experience and knowledge in CCA policy. To sum up: political instability can impede both top-down and bottom-up efforts towards CCA policy implementation.

Nepal does not present a unique case, since it should be observed that Vietnam — a single-party state — faces similar political barriers to CCA. Frequent changes between civil servant postings at its local levels result in a lack of dedicated and coordinated efforts towards CCA policy implementation. Furthermore, commune and district level actors are rarely knowledgeable about climate change and its impacts, resulting in half-hearted political action.

In India, the 2008 National Action Plan for Climate Change (NAPCC) has been the most significant driver of climate change mitigation and adaptation policy and has similarly confronted national-local divides in its implementation. As a strongly fiscal-federalist state, India’s climate policy is top-down oriented, and thus confronts issues of specificity. Although states have been encouraged to submit their own climate action plans for central endorsement, state-level administrations often lack the technical, scientific, and institutional capacities to develop well-researched and highly-specialized plans. Furthermore, states also lack the financial and technical resources required to then implement such plans. These issues have reportedly been addressed in India by a sustained central campaign to involve state governments, although the implementation of CCA programs still remains in its early stages in India today and is largely tied up with broader economic and human development goals.

Developed economies face similar institutional and political constraints: local agencies in the US have taken decades to build climate change responsive institutional frameworks, while CCA efforts towards nation-wide coastal planning are hindered by regional-municipal interests in the UK.

The Takeaway

The overarching political constraint on CCA thus seems to be one of institutional design. Warring, confused, and uncoordinated interchanges between national and state-level political and private actors have prevented the development and implementation of effective, regionally-specific CCA measures. One wonders if the core barrier to national-local climate policy coordination is not the low priority that is oftentimes accorded to climate change action: across the world, climate change is given a backseat against other priorities in economic and social development. What may really be required is a vast and growing public awareness of the dire, pressing, and myriad issues posed by climate change to a whole range of peoples, communities, and individuals. For timely redressal of climate change mitigation and adaptation, the issue of global warming must transcend the political divides across the international, national, and regional spectra, and must be addressed as the most critical security and livelihood threat to modern humankind.