DUBAI // Countries must reduce their carbon emissions and move towards renewable energy as extreme weather events are increasing across the world, former Mexican president Felipe Calderon told the World Government Summit on Wednesday.
With catastrophic forecasts for the Middle East and North Africa over the next 30 years because of drought, the chairman of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate listed recommendations for countries to follow.
“Carbon emissions and the average temperature of the air have been quite stable in the past 1,000 years,” Mr Calderon said. “But once the industrial revolution took place carbon emissions went up dramatically.
“What is important to observe is that the average temperature of the air went up, too.”
He mentioned the 2014 typhoon in the Philippines that killed 6,000 people in two days as the example of extreme weather.
“It is happening everywhere,” Mr Calderon said. “We see floods in Asia, terrible drought in North America and it is expected that food production will decrease almost 15 per cent in the north of China and North Korea because of this kind of drought.
“What is happening is that the climate is changing everywhere and we need to realise these changes are due to human activity.”
The past three decades were found to be the hottest in history.
“Carbon emissions are acting like a big sweater around the atmosphere and those gases are preventing the solar energy going out so it pushes them back to the Earth, which creates global warming,” Mr Calderon said.
“The forecast says there will be terrible drought in the next 30 years that will provoke human catastrophes in the Middle East and North Africa. If the evidence is so clear, what are the reasons we are not acting to address climate change?”
The main obstacle is the general perception that taking action on climate change implied huge economic cost, the commission found. “For a lot of governments, they need to pick fostering economic growth or tackling climate change,” Mr Calderon said. “But for us, we asked, ‘Is that correct or is that a false dilemma?’”
After two years of research, the commission produced two reports with conclusions that the claim was wrong.
“It is possible to have better growth and better climate at the same time,” Mr Calderon said. “But to do that we need to take action and very courageous decisions in the next 15 years. This is the last window of opportunity mankind will have.”
He said three systems needed to be changed, including the models for cities.
“We had one billion cars in the world five years ago,” Mr Calderon said. “If we are to follow this trend we will reach 3 billion cars by the middle of this century – but it is physically impossible.
“This model of cities is provoking a very important part of carbon emissions and reducing productivity of the economy while hurting economic growth.”
He gave the examples of Atlanta in the US and Barcelona in Spain, both of which have the same number of inhabitants. But the Spanish city has an urban area of 162 square kilometres compared with 4,200 sq km in Atlanta, so carbon emissions from transport were found to be 10 times higher in the US city.
Land use is also in need of change, Mr Calderon said, with 20 per cent of total carbon emissions generated by deforestation because of farming or soil degradation.
“We need to stop deforestation and recover the degraded soil,” he said.
“By doing that, we gain productivity in the economy as well, but we need to increase productivity in the agricultural sector to produce more food for more people. It’s a technological challenge.”
Energy intensity will also have to be reduced.
“The whole idea is to de-carbonise economic growth. Any consumer in his house or any company in its factory could reduce energy intensity, and with that they could make profits and save the planet at the same time, by moving to a low-carbon economy and low-carbon sources,” he said.
cmalek@thenational.ae