Climate crisis: There is no Planet B

Steam rising from a coal-fired power plant near wind turbines in Germany. Despite knowing how harmful they are, the world still has not taken steps to begin weaning itself off fossil fuels. — AP

November 2022 has been an interesting month – two important international meetings were held in our region: the Asean Summit in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and the G20 meeting in Bali, Indonesia. Both of these meetings and the preparations for them saw leaders try to address some of the most pressing challenges we face as a planetary community.

And then there was the meeting of the 27th Conference of the Parties on Climate Change – or COP27 – in Egypt, the 27th in a series of global conferences on the climate emergency.

At the same time, we held our 15th General Election. The new government has a massive agenda of issues to tackle. For me, and hopefully for many of us, there is a recognition of the increasingly stark links between what we need to sustain our standards of living and livelihoods in the short term, and the challenges that we will need to face in the medium and longer terms. The new government needs to set out a programme that tackles both of these.

It was a shame that election preparations meant that we were unable to send any of our elected officials to COP27. But it’s worth noting that the Malaysian delegation this year was the largest we have ever sent.

And what of the outcomes of all of these meetings?

The G20 was mainly preoccupied by the Russia-Ukraine war and its devastating impacts on the people of Ukraine, on the global economy and its fragile supply chains. Asean’s summit was overshadowed by the situation in Myanmar. Geopolitical tensions between the “great powers” also underpinned both the meetings.

But at the most important of these gatherings, COP27, the one at which significant steps were expected on limiting and phasing out the use of fossil fuels, there was a rather mixed bag of outcomes.

On the more positive side, after many years of wrangling there was finally agreement on setting up a Loss and Damage Fund. “Loss and damage” refers to costs incurred from climate-fuelled weather extremes or impacts, like rising sea levels.

It’s worth noting that climate funding so far has focused mostly on cutting carbon dioxide emissions in an effort to limit global warming, while about a third of it has gone towards projects to help communities adapt to future impacts. Loss and damage funding is different, specifically covering the cost of damage that countries cannot avoid or adapt to.

The establishment of this fund has been on the table since the COP meetings started in 1995 in Berlin. And so garnering agreement on setting it up was a hugely significant moment, no doubt accelerated by the presence of countries and people directly affected by the increasing severity of climate related events, such as Pakistan which suffered terrible floods only two months ago.

An even bigger, and long anticipated, COP27 outcome to monitor is the call to reform the global financial system’s structure and processes.

And so there is progress. But there is no agreement yet over what should count as loss and damage caused by climate change, which could include damaged infrastructure and property, as well as harder-to-value natural ecosystems or cultural assets.

Negotiations have begun but they will be long and difficult. This, combined with a series of missed funding targets to support adaptation and mitigation agreed by developed nations at previous COPs and running into the tens of billions of dollars, means that the journey will be arduous.

Somewhat less positively, language calling for a phase out of fossil fuels was jettisoned from the final text of the outcome document, while new wording was added calling for accelerated development of “low-emission” energy systems, which many fear will be used to justify further natural gas development.

The squeeze on energy in the developed world, largely due to the Russian offensive in Ukraine, is a primary cause of the dilution of language between the Glasgow meeting a year ago and this one.

And one of the most visible groups at the COP27 was the fossil fuel industry whose presence “makes COP27 looks like a fossil fuel trade fair” according to one campaigner. There can be little doubt that their presence and influence contributed to the dilution of the final outcome text.

The relatively muted outcomes of all of these meetings indicate that times are hard, that addressing aggression is difficult, and that global governance is not working very well. But most importantly they speak to the enormous challenges we face in weaning ourselves off fossil fuels.

The evidence of damage greenhouse gas emissions from coal, oil and gas are causing is clear and increasingly immediate but some argue that these climate talks are all about ever-more studious analyses of where to move the goalposts next rather than to make progress – and it seems that COP27 is no different.

So where do we go from here? The failure of global climate governance is a failure for and by all of us. Wait-ing for a global process to determine what we must do and the action that we need to take – as people, as Malaysians and as planetary citizens – strikes me as being the wrong approach. We have signed up to our commitments; we now need to demonstrate, as a nation, that we are meeting them.

We must press the new government for acceleration of Malaysia’s Long-Term Low Emissions Development Strategy – delayed because of the elections.

We need companies engaged in fossil fuel-related production (oil companies, plastics producers, retail sector, etc) to commit to the transition to carbon neutrality now, especially through nature-based solutions, and not to wait until they are forced to do so.

We must raise our voices and stress the extreme urgency for fossil fuel-dependent corporations and related businesses to rapidly scale up transformational innovation so that fossil fuels stay where they belong – in the ground.

We need to work with regional and international partners to accelerate the race to net zero emissions and to not lose sight of the need to restrict temperature increase to 1.5°C.

And we the people need to play our part. Yes, we have short-term needs to meet – food on the table, kids in school, and bills to pay. But we also need to look up, to see what’s happening beyond our immediate reality, and to play our part in lessening the impact of how we live our lives.

As global governance falters there is a greater than ever need for every one of us to step up and be the change we want to see. After all, it is us who are consumers of everything produced by fossil fuels and it is us who, ultimately, must change our ways and force the providers of services to change theirs. There is no magic wand. This is hard. It will be uncomfortable. But as I have said before – there is no Planet B.

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Dr Jemilah Mahmood, a physician and experienced crisis leader, was appointed the executive director of the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health at Sunway University in August 2021. She is the founder of aid organisation Mercy Malaysia and has served in leadership roles internationally with the United Nations and Red Cross for the last decade. She writes on Planetary Health Matters once a month in StarLifestyle.

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