Advances in Science

China emits 23.9 percent of greenhouse gases (GG); the United States, 11.84 percent; Russia, 4 percent; and Indonesia, 3.48 percent, according to 2020 data from Climate Watch. India is not included in these metrics, although there are others that state it is responsible for around 7 percent of the worldwide total emissions. Meanwhile, the European Union, that is considered a block even because of the common climate policies and goals shared by all 27 member states, emits 6.81 percent
 
Within this top 6 biggest emitters an intense battle is fought, as in many other countries, to align economic growth with environmental sustainability. Amid the geopolitical turmoil, different arguments have appeared related to the climate crisis, such as “until the other parts commit and show real actions, I will not do so; I won’t make efforts on my own,” or “let’s wait until the others react, so I can profit.” This “climate stowaway” thought embodies a double tragedy: on the one hand, it has made most nations abide by that logic and feel less responsible, and on the other hand, it led to the dilemma of cooperation, as it is known in scientific literature. Because in the end, with this logic, nobody does anything.
 
The planet is heating up quite rapidly. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), between 2030 and 2052, the global surface temperature increase will be very close to a 1.5°C, which would make Earth lose its stability before expected. In this context, the Paris Agreement (AP) was signed in 2015 as a regulatory framework agreed upon by 196 countries that, before the IPCC alerts, have defined goals for mitigating GG emissions as established by nations according to their own criteria. This was called the nationally determined contributions (NDC), which, it should be said, are not binding or subject to compliance assurance by an independent, multilateral scientific body. In this sense, the Sustainable Development Goals (DSG) were outlined and accepted that year. These goals set out the principle of action by governments, companies, academia, and other organizations in sustainability.
 
However, some years later, results have been scarce. At this stage, these acquired commitments, as stated by the United Nations (UN), would only help reduce a third of the amount required to avoid a 2°C temperature increase by 2100. “The environmental governance stage, almost seven years after signing the AP and adopting the SDG is heterogeneous, ambiguous, and, ultimately, negative,” says Franchini, professor at the Faculty of International, Political and Urban Studies at Universidad del Rosario, and his colleague Ana Carolina Evangelista, professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences and International Relations at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana.
 
Latin America and the Caribbean are a clear representation of this scenario. For the internationalist Matías Franchini, who has done research on global environmental governance and climate change policies for more than a decade, “analyzing the bigger picture, the degree of commitment in the region to mitigate the climate crisis is low to medium, and given its emission level (8 percent), it is conceived as a moderately conservative player within climate governance.”
 

Naturally, this is not a complimentary conclusion, considering that the atmosphere is a global asset, and it is less so knowing that the majority of the population in this side of the world, at 660 million people, is at high or extreme climate risk, especially in the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and certain areas in the Andes. The vulnerability is not only given by the physical exposure to increasingly stronger climate events but also by the limited capabilities of adaptation, as expressed by Franchini in a study published in 2021 by Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. In the study, he analyzes the performance of several Latin American and Caribbean countries to fight against the climate crisis.

In his analysis, Franchini starts from two fundamental axis: the trajectories of GG emissions and the type of public policies in each country, taking as a main reference those countries with a higher impact in the regional aggregate (which, in order, would be Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Venezuela). These five nations represent 80 percent of regional emissions, and only Brazil represents a third thereof (see chart with relevant information by country). Moreover, since the Paris Agreement, the level of climate commitment in the region has deteriorated, as a consequence of the environmental governance degradation in Brazil and Mexico

 

When countries reopened business activities after the lockdowns, economies resumed their old ways.

For the author, the three main characteristics of the emitting profile in the region are the high but decreasing emissions related to agriculture and land use changes, mainly due to deforestation and cultivation in forested areas, the relatively high but declining participation of renewable energy sources in the energy matrix, and agriculture emissions higher than the global average. Thus, the bigger challenges in the region are to control deforestation, foster a cleaner agriculture, and decarbonize the economies. However, a measure that does not help in this sense is that all countries in this region of the world are subsidizing fossil fuels, even those that have established taxes on carbon, which are actually extremely low (from U$S1 to 3 in Mexico, up to U$S6 in Colombia, by ton emitted, compared to U$S140 in Sweden, for instance).
 

Faced with environmental governance (all the rules, tools, practices, and institutions that preserve, protect, and also exploit the environment), Franchini highlights how, in the previous five years, it has dwindled in the main state players. Brazil and Mexico are the most outstanding cases: the former, being led by a president who openly denies the climate crisis, and the latter, being led by one who thinks oil is the key to develop its economy. They both decide on their own, something that is common in the region. “Except for some blocks of Central American and Caribbean nations, countries in Latin America do not negotiate together or have similar positions in climate change negotiations for two main reasons: their economic and foreign interests are different, and their integration strategies change depending on the governing party. Thus, any integration project stays a myth,” explains Franchini.

 Individual actions matter a lot

 

Matías Franchini, Professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences, Government and International Relations at Universidad del Rosario, has been researching global environmental governance and climate change policies for over a decade.

Even though States are usually repositories of all the responsibilities, this is merely a mirage that does not take pity in the reality shown by this new period we are living in: the Anthropocene, determined by the impact exerted by the human being on the environment.
 
Under this perspective, it is not a set of powers or government agents who sovereignly fix, in absolute terms, the climate path; better yet, individual actions magnify themselves in synergies.
 
Clearly, the States’ reaction and ability to act is insufficient to make the drastic changes that this crisis demands. In this sense, it is essential to intervene individually, including agents in various levels, such as universities, cities, regions, social movements, political parties, etc
 
The COVID-19 pandemic showed us that both the interrelationship of global matters and individual actions spread and contribute to our shared future. However, this flashing conscience from the pandemic in its rales was just “a swallow that, precisely, did not foretell the summer,” as the popular saying goes.
 
Months after the first reopening after quarantine, economies retook the practices of what they knew how to do in the old ways, amid the limitations that were still imposed by the global sanitary emergency.
 
Today, two and a half years later, the recovery is evident, but no less overwhelming. “The global economy has recovered from the pandemic recession with some particularities, such as the high public indebtedness, the disruption of global value chains, and high inflation; however, the structure of stimuli that guide the economic players is still being shortterm profit without big transformations in terms of sustainability,” comment Franchini and Evangelista in a joint publication in April on the environmental crisis, the pandemic and the worldwide geopolitical conflict.
 
For the researchers, “the most valuable, and painful, lesson that the pandemic has taught us to address the global environmental crisis is that, when faced with existential crisis, humanity can react, but in a late, costly, and excluding way.”.
 

The window to moderate climate effects is getting smaller, and the severity of the complex environmental challenges require “a deep, global and transversal governance that means progressively substituting the dominance of selfish, immediate interests of societies and individuals with the search of the global well-being in the long term.”  
 
It is true that Latin America and the Caribbean have, for decades, suffered from poverty, lack of growth, authoritarianism, insecurity, and violence, among others. Their social, political, and economic agendas have these issues as a priority over other topics. But, hopefully, it is not too late to understand that speaking of environmental imbalance, the urgent matters are, indeed, the most pressing.  
 
Ambiguity is Duque’s environmental legacy”

For Matías Franchini, Iván Duque’s government management in environmental matters, in general, and climate matters, in particular, is ambiguous. By the end of 2020, his government presented before the United Nations Climate Convention a new nationally determined contribution that involves reducing 51% of the greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, a rather ambitious goal that caused surprise nationally and globally. However, according to Franchini, the technical basis to determine said figure is unclear, as is its viability. Truth is, this statement generated a positive impact that allowed Duque to project the country as an environmental leader.
 
“However, there is a very marked ambiguity: on the one hand, an international speech that shows Colombia as a climate leader renowned by the international community, especially the United States; on the other hand, within the country, we can see an increase in the deforestation levels and in murders of environmental leaders, a situation that shamefully puts the country in the first place in this category. Also, there weren’t many big green growth measures in the economic recovery package after the pandemic and, additionally, there is still support for fracking, a measure that certainly does not show climate leadership.” In turn, for Germán Poveda, professor at Universidad Nacional de Colombia and former member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, since 2015, the management of the last two government offices is rather poor in climate terms:
 
Although Colombia has cleared its conscience saying that we emit less than 1% of greenhouse gases, this argument is not valid to have maintained for so long real -not ideal- politics of inaction before threats, risks, and impacts caused by climate change. This is a very timid and late goal.”
 
Considering that a third of the Colombian emissions arise from deforestation, we should focus our public policies there, in order to mitigate climate change. Now, the overwhelming loss of forests, particularly in Amazonia, is a problem that did not arise in the recent years, and that was known to aggravate after signing the Peace Agreement with FARCs, as warned by environmental entities of different levels and the very government of Juan Manuel Santos. However, the right measures to contain or counterbalance the impacts were not taken. What are these measures? “Controlling the territory, having State presence, implementing the Peace Agreement and establishing new mechanisms so that populations that enter illicit economies can have licit substitutes for their economic sustenance. The matter has such a magnitude that one may say that, if Colombia manages to control or mitigate deforestation, it will be able to solve a series of historical problems in the country,” concludes Franchini.