Development & Aid, Environment, Tierramerica

Climate Change Imposes New Conditions for Policy

SANTIAGO, Sep 8 2008 (IPS) - If the raw material export sector and the governments of Latin America insist on depredatory productive systems, it will be unlikely that natural resources will be able to sustain future development, writes Chilean environmental leader Sara Larraín in this exclusive column for Tierramérica.

Climate change, once merely scientific data, is today an urgent political imperative. To confront it is a tremendous challenge for the planet's society and a challenge for the global economy.

In Latin America, this is no minor thing, because a sharp increase in average temperatures is predicted: between 0.6 and 1.2 degrees Celsius by the year 2020, and between 1.8 and 4.5 degrees more by 2080, in addition to a decline in rainfall, particularly in the Southern Cone region of South America.

These change will gravely affect continental environments and the availability of water for human consumption, electricity generation and agricultural production; there will be greater deterioration of forests and mountain ecosystems and more desertification.

Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) affirms that the greatest social, economic and environmental impacts in the region will hit farming, water supplies, and public health.

For the countries of Latin America, whose economies rely to a great extent on revenues from the production, processing and export of hydrocarbons, exports of raw materials and sectors with intensive use of water and energy, such as paper, steel and mining, the mitigation of this phenomenon constitutes a challenge for the heart of the productive structure.

Our region is obligated to design strategies that consume less of our natural capital, that are less intensive in water, energy and transport, and that create more jobs.

But it also needs new approaches in urban planning, transportation and energy infrastructure, with an emphasis on energy efficiency and on the development of unconventional renewable energy sources.

Despite this outlook, Latin America has great potential for the biological mitigation of climate change, that is, the conservation of existing ecosystems and greater capacity to capture of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse-effect gas.

Working Group II says that forests, farmland and other land-based ecosystems can be preserved and capture a great deal of carbon, giving time to technological changes and for new patterns of production and consumption to be developed and implemented. But this potential must be translated into a political commitment that our region has yet to make.

Consensus exists that at the core of the strategies for adapting to climate change is the protection of ecosystems.

The Group recommends reinforcing policies, planning and management in order to prevent exploitation and degradation and also to “empower” communities as a means to protect territories and develop local economies based on environmental services, with a priority on forms of agro-ecological improvement and production and establishing new protected areas.

Adaptation to more arid conditions across 60 percent of the Latin American territory will also require a significant increase in investments for supplying water to the population.

In addition to the 17.7 billion dollars established in the Millennium Development Goals for ensuring potable water for 121 million more people by 2015, the region must invest in protecting bodies of water, above and below ground, re-use and recycling of water in industrial processes and optimizing consumption in order to adapt to extended periods of hydric stress, aggravated by the rapid shrinking of glaciers expected in the decades of 2020 and 2030.

Despite these impacts, and the recommendations of the international scientific community made at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, deforestation has increased and today is intensifying in countries like Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay as a result of the expansion of soybean cultivation, which also feeds desertification and affects the water cycle and climate in general.

If 60 percent of the Amazon could disappear as a result of urban and biofuel expansion, if Patagonia suffers the threat of industrialization with the construction of mega-hydroelectric dams in Chile, if the glaciers of the Andes are destroyed by mining operations, it is clear that the current modality for utilization of natural resources only aggravates the threats of climate change for the systems of local production and, in consequence, increases the vulnerability of human communities.

If the powerful raw material export sector and the governments of Latin America insist on depredatory productive systems and continue to blame others for the impacts of climate change, it is unlikely that natural resources will be able to sustain future development.

Climate change is a long-term global problem and involves complex interactions among climate, environmental, economic, political, institutional, social and technological processes, at the international and intergenerational levels. Confronting a new climate system and the exacerbation of extreme phenomena requires new forms of managing human and natural systems.

Our region faces great threats to its territories and productive systems from climate change. But also has great opportunities to reorient public policies under criteria of equality and sustainability in energy, agriculture, urban planning and natural resources management.