National rivalry and non-cooperation is a climate response killer

Last night, Prime Minister Morrison declared sovereign nations need to eschew an “unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy” and the world needs to avoid “negative globalism”. He went on to state that the key to prospering through the transitions “was individual, like-minded sovereign nations acting together with enlightened self-interest”.

It is an action orientated set of comments on international institutions, particularly in calling for an audit of our involvement in different institutions

While he was careful not to name names, given his UN speech pushing back on recent criticisms of Australia from the climate change response community, it may be that he is referring to organisations such as the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Nothing wrong with an audit, right? Just an audit, recommendations etc.

But there is more to play for with Australia’s involvement in these institutions.

Our involvement in international institutions determines the future state of the response to global issues like climate change.

The SSP project is a scenario analysis process being developed for the IPCC sixth assessment report due to be published in 2021. These narratives are future scenarios of global society in absence of climate change policies. The view was that climate policy analysis was not very useful if we didn’t place them into a set of future scenarios.

The five SSPs are:

1. Sustainability -Gradual but pervasive shift to lower material growth, resource use and energy intensity
2. Middle of the road – Continuing of historical patterns
3. Regional rivalry -Intensified focus on national and regional issues at the expense of global issues
4. Inequality – Increased gap between rich and poor
5. Fossil-fuel development – Renewed focus on improving global living standards using fossil fuel resources.

Regional rivalry is explained, in detail, as

Regional Rivalry – A Rocky Road (High challenges to mitigation and adaptation)
A resurgent nationalism, concerns about competitiveness and security, and regional conflicts push countries to increasingly focus on domestic or, at most, regional issues. Policies shift over time to become increasingly oriented toward national and regional security issues. Countries focus on achieving energy and food security goals within their own regions at the expense of broader-based development. Investments in education and technological development decline. Economic development is slow, consumption is material-intensive, and inequalities persist or worsen over time. Population growth is low in industrialized and high in developing countries. A low international priority for addressing environmental concerns leads to strong environmental degradation in some regions.

SSP 3 has the worst GDP growth but low population growth.

But due to rivalry and non-cooperation, SSP3 results, under one model run (MESSAGE), in higher coal use than even the SSP 5 which is the fossil future scenario where we burn fossil fuel to generate sufficient wealth to then response to climate change.

For the climate nerds, SSP3 is the only scenario where it is not possible for the models to optimize a path to reaching climate targets of a 2 degree increase or less by 2100. Regional rivalry and resurgent nationalism limiting the ability of the world to cooperate on reducing emissions over the next few decades.

Even the fossil fuel had 2/4 model runs show a pathway to less than 2 degrees!

So audit or investigation. It doesn’t matter. We should be aware that international cooperation is a key element of climate response. We may find ourselves in a place where there is no pathway.