‘Where does your President [Duterte] stand on this [the Philippines’s pledge to the Paris Agreement on climate change]?” Frank Jotzo, deputy director of Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University, popped this question during his lecture analyzing the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) by Asian countries in a recent climate-change forum held at the School of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of the Philippines Diliman.
It is well known that after taking his oath, President Duterte had rather scathing remarks on climate change, saying that he had no intention of abiding by the pledges because the country is just beginning to industrialize.
In effect, he was saying the Philippines need to have a larger carbon footprint compared to other advanced countries that had squandered carbon emissions while developing their industries. President Duterte said he was not the one who signed the agreement. But a significant ideal given by Jotzo’s lecture may well have neutralized the defiance of Mr. Duterte, even before he had expressed them.
“No one likes to reduce economic growth. What everyone wants to do is to take the pollution out of economic growth—have a decarbonized system. We want [economic] growth, but we want green growth.” Jotzo said. And the matrix that gets directly to that objective is the ratio of emissions to GDP. Each country has its own scheme to reach the agreed temperature and net emission by mid-century well-below 2° Celsius.
Jotzo said China and India have defined their targets in this matrix, as they are uncertain about their future rates of GDP growth.
“If it turns out that they grow really fast in years to come, then this kind of commitment gives them room in their emissions,” he said. “There are different value propositions based on what is politically, economically and socially feasible for every country and government,” Jotzo added.
Besides the ratio of emissions to GDP, another scheme is for all countries to have only so much emissions per capita. Each of the 189 countries that have made commitments to the 2015 Paris Agreement have pledged to the global emissions reduction at 2°C by 2030 starting in 2020, and claim that they are consistent with the target. But because of the different values and schemes, most individual country pledges are not compatible with the 2°C expected outcome when all the pledges are added up.
“It comes out at 3°C,” Jotzo said.
“There’s a mismatch,” Jotzo said, adding that there’s a need to make every country understand that more needs to be done—and can be done.
Jotzo gave as an example his chosen home country, Australia. He said Australia is usually in the category of “not enough” because there is a commitment to reduce emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent.
“That, by itself, is a significant ambition. However, Australia is the highest per-capita emitter among the major countries and also among the richest countries in the world and, therefore, will be easy for them to pay for some action,” he said.
Australia also uses a lot of coal energy, even while it has unlimited potential for renewable energy—wind solar, wave, biomass. But this will cost a lot of money so politicians are reluctant, he said. Each government looks into different schemes and chooses one that has them doing very little. It’s a typical political process, Jotzo said.
Fair share
But Jotzo also stressed the significance of fair share, as in the case of the Philippine pledge.
The key aspect of the pledge, he cited, is that the country recognizes its responsibility to contribute its fair share to global action, and fair share presumes that richer countries will have to do more. Jotzo recommended that the right way to do this is to consider the country’s growth and development and start from a consultative process to determine the peak in its emissions.
He said he particularly likes the view of the Philippine pledge because it explicitly recognizes that it is the start of a journey and not the end.
“It is not like saying ‘Ok we have submitted our documents to the UN [United Nations] so we have done our part.’ This is saying this is the starting point for national and policy conversation about where we should go. The country views this as a transition as early as it can for resilient, efficient, adaptive sustainably clean-driven economy,” Jotzo said, in praise of the Philippine pledge.
He also viewed that the 70-percent reduction of the Philippine pledge is certainly ambitious, especially in the light of the fact that the Philippine per-capita emission, compared to other countries, is somewhere at the bottom, while Australia is at the very top. He cited that the Philippine per-capita emission stands at 2 tons per person. Coincidentally, this is where the world needs to be around 2050.
Recognizing that there is no ethical basis for equitably allocating the space left in the atmosphere or for saying that one country should dispose less emissions into the atmosphere than another, the comparison nevertheless gives a glaring comparison that shows, which countries have to do more to come down to the level of the Philippine per-capita emission.
Jotzo also pointed out that the Asian Development Bank (ADB) member-countries, including the Philippines, have explicitly stated that their pledges will rely on financial and technological aid. He considered this as a reasonable condition because their capacities to leverage all the required investments may not exist on the domestic level. Also, it offers a lot of opportunities for international investment, such as in energy-power generation and transport systems.
Many climate-change goals are linked to development goals, like for the 38 ADB member-countries, including all ADB developing countries, for which these goals, are conditioned on external financing. But Jotzo said seemingly, collaboration among countries lean heavily on the need to get money from other countries and that there is very little talk on opportunities on working together on research and development and on schemes to implement the pledges and programs.
He cited, for example, that among the ADB nations, 19 countries have renewable-energy targets, with some aiming for 100-percent shift to renewable sources of power. But in many of these cases, there are low-class grids, which can be seen as either a problem or an opportunity for countries to work on together, because there can be an option to work on something between islands. “You have renewables on low-class grids that sends specific problems but also specific opportunities because renewables are scalable infinitely compared to coal plants,” Jotzo said.
He added that ambitious as the Philippine pledge may be, it is what countries should be aiming for. “Clearly you have an ambitious target here dependent on international support. Try to get that international support and channel it to different sectors,” Jotzo advised the audience, including members of academe, scientists, environmentalists and urban planners. “Let’s remind our government [Philippines’s] of the Paris Agreement. Let it not be forgotten,” he urged.
It is important to note that President Duterte, in his first State of the Nation Address last month, softened his stance on climate change and said global warming will be a “top priority” of his administration. “Addressing climate change shall be a top priority, but upon a fair and equitable equation. It should not stymie our industrialization,” Duterte said in his speech. “I have to protect the country…. The interests of the country must come first.”