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This regular column, "The Developing World," appears in Environmental Forum, the policy journal of the Environmental Law Institute. It address international environmental concerns, developing countries, and development finance and institutions, including topics such as climate change, climate finance, and corruption, as well as particular issues in individual countries.
Last year the International Monetary Fund reported that the world’s nations in 2022 had nearly doubled since 2020 their subsidization of oil, gas, and yes, still coal, to an all-time high of over $7 trillion annually. This amount is 7.1 percent of total world global domestic product.
In 2023 average global temperatures reached the highest level ever measured. Saudi Aramco, Qatar Energy, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and Total announced major production expansion plans. The United Nations “Production Gap” study examined disconnects between climate pledges of governments while their fossil fuel production will increase 110 percent by 2030.
In 2022 Brazil's President Bolsonaro, self styled "Tropical Trump," promoted polices leading to 43 percent of world tropical forest loss that year. His successor, Luiz Lula de Silva, reversed these destructive policies. Within months deforestation decreased 33.6 percent. But narco gang led deforestation to launder money in land speculation is a new threat.
Last November the 27th Conference of the Parties to the Climate Convention agreed to establish a new “Loss and Damage” fund to compensate nations “particularly vulnerable” to the impacts of global warming. The need for such help is clear. Global warming induced loss and damage in developing nations will rise to as much as $1 trillion per year by 2040.
The 27th Conference of the Parties to the Climate Convention that met last November struggled with unresolved tensions that have persisted since the first COP took place in 1995. Most major CO2 emitters have failed to deliver on previous emission reduction commitments, and richer nations have faiiled to deliver on reduction committments.
In June, 2022 UN Secretary General António Guterres stood before more than 6000 delegates from 150 nations to open the second United Nations Oceans Conference in Lisbon Portugal. “Sadly,” he lamented, “we have taken the ocean for granted and today we face what I would call an ocean emergency.” Despite some positive developments, overall trends are alarming.
On March 21, 2022 United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that the world is “sleepwalking to climate catastrophe.” An example is the massive international public finance abetting exploitation of the world’s largest newly discovered offshore oil and gas deposits off the coast of Guyana and Surinam.
Greta Thunberg said the 26th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Climate Convention, like the past quarter century of COPs, amounted to “blah blah blah.” Queen Elizabeth II observed “they talk but they don’t do.” Are they right? Let’s look at some snapshots.
Imagine a tiny uninhabited islet in the Caribbean—smaller than Manhattan’s Central Park—where over two decades ago researchers were astonished to identify more than 650 species,Navassa Island, 40 miles off the western coast of Haiti, is the longest continually claimed U.S. foreign possession. But has Navassa ever legitimately belonged to the U.S.?
Last February 13th the Indian government arrested in the south Indian city of Bengalaru (Bangalore) an apparently highly dangerous young woman. Security forces extradited her immediately to Delhi to appear before a court the very next day. Police alleged that 21year old Disha Ravi contributed to a coordinated international conspiracy....
The world’s largest new oil and gas project is taking place 120 miles offshore from Guyana. Exxonmobil (45 percent share) together with Hess (30 percent), and the Chinese company CNOOC (25 percent) are developing offshore wells that will produce 13.6 billion barrels of oil and 32 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
In the midst of accelerating global warming, tens of billions of dollars continue to flow from private and public international banks into financing new coal fired plants, especially in Asia and Africa.
When I first came to Washington in the 1980s I heard references to “leakage” from contacts in the World Bank and U.S. Treasury Department. I wondered how it could be that a well-funded institution like the Bank would neglect maintenance of its plumbing—wasn’t it time to fix the leaky toilets and faucets immediately and reduce the water bills?
A leading businsess school professor (USC) advocate for Corporate Socical Responsibility concludes that the incentives of shareholder capitalism are inimical to sustainability: More regulation needed.
The Huichol peope of central Mexico still go on long distance pilgrimages to natural sites where for them the sun and world were born. These 'ambulatory weavings of ritual texts' are 'readings of a codex extended on the landscape.' In recent years this 'nomad itinerant university' has been partly threatened.by mining development.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation as well as other international organizations are not totally immune from lawsuits in the US. After four years, the litigation could continue substantially longer. For poor farmers and fisherfolk in India, justice delayed is justice denied.
“Dirty money” flows totalling over $1.1 trillion a year support human trafficking, global drug mafias, terrorist networks, and arms smuggling, as well as fueling international wildlife trafficking, poaching, and deforestation. Technically legal tax evasion and capital flight through tax havens costs developing nations $200 billion annually.
Robert Kuttner's recent book, “Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism,“ warns that “corporate and financial elites have substantially captured the machinery of the state,” as well as governance institutions of the international economy such as the World Bank, World Trade Organization, and the European Union.
Specialized environmental courts have proliferated around the world, growing from 350 in 2009 to over 1,200 in 44 countries by 2017. India’s National Green Tribunal is an innovative court [that] is handling a huge case load and issuing landmark decisions.
The award of the 2017 Nobel Prize for economics to Richard Thaler highlights the recognition that human behavior is more complex and irrational than the assumptions of conventional, still prevalent economic models.
A look back at the Clean Development Mechanism and at future reduction efforts.....The study [on behalf of the European Commission] identifies inherently contradictory incentives in international carbon offset trading that undermine attempts at reform: “Information asymmetry between project developers and regulators” — the developers have a big advantage in...
The paradox is that the natural law rationale, sometimes advanced domestically to justify weakening government regulation, arguably supports with greater cogency stronger environmental and social safeguards.
On a crowded planet, environmental protection and social equity are inextricably interrelated. Attempting to achieve either alone will ultimately fail without simultaneously pursuing the other.
Environmental organizations and funders have too often promoted new fads driven by a culture of unrealistic expectations, leading to a cycle of rejection, reinvention, and repackaging without learning the lessons of failure.
Imagine a city with the highest murder rate on earth, where public areas are deserted, and hundreds of thousands of refugees live in shantytowns. Another city has a violence rate ten times lower and is a world capital of green innovation and sustainable transport,
Turkey, the world’s 17th largest economy, plans to as much as quadruple coal-fired electric capacity, building as many as 80 new plants by 2030. It could become the world’s third-largest operator of coal plants, after China and India.
The United Nations Green Climate Fund is the principal international mechanism to channel finance from richer nations to developing countries for climate change mitigation and adaptation.....Official rhetoric notwithstanding, the underlying theme seems to be moving the money.
World Bank efforts to weaken environmental and social safeguard policies are provoking international concern....The Bank will only remain relevant by refocusing on the environmental and social quality of its lending, rather than abandoning it.
A recent review of the economic costs and benefits of 245 large dams by four Oxford professors....found “overwhelming evidence” that the real costs of large dam projects, are for the most part too large to yield a positive economic return....
The land of present-day Georgia and adjacent areas is the center of origin of the cultivation of numerous fruits, vegetables, and grains,...The links between Georgia’s cultural history and its agricultural legacy led UNESCO to designate Georgia’s winemaking tradition as part of the “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity."
An article by four UK researchers...concludes that despite long-standing strategies that purport to achieve biodiversity protection and poverty alleviation, actual empirical evidence is often lacking about the success of such projects. Results are undermined by vague and poorly defined conceptions of both poverty and biodiversity, as well as by a chronic lac...
Climate change mitigation faces the powerful forces of a deregulated, voracious globalized economy fed by increasing demand for energy and resources....A seminal 2012 article by Philip Fearnside of Brazil’s National Institute for Amazon Research identifies how these threats in the Amazon are linked with the growing role of China in the Brazilian economy.
World Bank President Kim praised the Bank International Finance Corporation, its private sector investment branch, as a model, despite environmental and social conflicts in IFC extractive projects around the world. As of 2019 the environmental and social conflicts associated with IFC mining and other extractive projects persist.
According to the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the internet has already become the dominant factor in the illegal global trade in protected species. No species is too obscure, too rare, or too remote in an electronically connected world to be a new profit center as it is driven to extinction.
The allure of an market that pays developing countries and forest communities to preserve standing forests as offsets for not reducing emissions in the richer industrialized nations resulted in the program of “reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation” (REDD+) in 2010. But REDD+ ignores the real political economy of many weak states.
The Rio Conference agreement, The Future We Want, pledged to “renew our commitment to sustainable development...” Meanwhile, hundreds of Brazilian Amerindians, from several threatened tribes, occupied the Belo Monte dam site in a gesture of defiance and desperation....
Cuba was the only country in the world that scored high on the United Nations Development Program Human Development Index and had an ecological footprint that was sustainable.....Cuba reorganized its entire agricultural economy into what author Bill McKibben characterized as “the world’s largest working model of semi-sustainable agriculture,”
A report of the World Bank Independent Evaluation Group concludes that efforts of the International Finance Corporation, to green operations of two Brazilian multinational agribusiness giants failed. It notes without irony that Greenpeace and other nongovernmental groups achieved much more with campaigns and boycotts.
The tragedy is that there already lies a clear path to achieve two thirds of the needed CO2 emission reductions, while supporting poverty-reducing clean energy investments in developing countries, without additional funding or wrestling with legal commitments to binding caps. Much of the financing could come from redirecting existing fossil fuel subsidies.....
The Kyoto Protocol, Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is based on the premise that a ton of greenhouse gas reductions can be purchased more cheaply in a developing country than a rich country. A 2011 U.S Government Accountability Offic report identified possibly unresolvable problems inherent in the CDM and carbon offsets in general.
Civil society groups and the United Nations argue that access to water is a basic human right, and subjecting access to water for the poor to market forces is ethically objectionable. For some economists and policymakers, privatization and market solutions are the only hope, given mismanagement of many public water utilities in developing nations.
The World Bank has become the main financial administrator of “climate investment funds as well as for 12 different "carbon funds." A growing literature has documented the lack of real additionality in many projects; i.e., whether emission credits for projects really contribute to net additional reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.....
The great Indian Emperor Ashoka (reigned 268–239 B.C.) promoted non-violence, religious tolerance, and protection of animals and habitat. Kautilya (c. 350–283 B.C.), chief minister of Ashoka’s grandfather, the Emperor Chandragupta, advocated protection of woodlands and reserves “where all animals are welcomed as guests and given full protection.”
The Barefoot College has trained hundreds of poor villagers as grassroots solar power installation workers and engineers. Founder Bunker Roy writes that “any goal that is driven from the top by international donors and governments not accountable to the communities and without financial transparency is doomed to fail."
Carbon capture and storgage would greatly increase the capital and operating costs of new plants. The cost of CCS is such that rapidly maturing technologies such as wind and solar thermal are highly competitive. They should be the overwhelming priority for new energy investments, alongside scaled up energy efficiency.
Ninety-seven percent of the increase in energy-related CO2 emissions through 2030 will occur in developing nations. Without major changes in international energy investment, the industrialized world could reduce its CO2 emissions to zero by 2030, but the planet would still overshoot irreversibly past the point of no return for dangerous global warming.
The $1.64 billion Ilisu Dam in Turkey will forcibly displace upwards of 65,000 ethnic Kurds. The export credit agencies (ECAs) of Austria, Germany, and Switzerland have approved nearly $600 million in loan guarantees for Ilisu....an egregious breach of the spirit if not the letter of the OECD “Common Approaches on Environment” for ECAs.
The scope of the Indian RTI (Right to Information) law exceeds that of similar laws in most industrial countries, applying to states, municipalities and other local bodies, as well as to the central government. It includes the right to information from the judiciary and parliament — the U.S. Freedom of Information Act applies only to the exective branch.
The world’s richest nations are preparing to deliver as much as $12 billion in extra funds to the World Bank to fight global warming. At the same time, the bank is accelerating lending for fossil fuels and giant coal-fired power plants around the world.
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© 2018- Bruce Rich | All Rights Reserved
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