Sir, – With Cop27 in full swing, the “loss and damage” approach has become a central issue, and one of the most contentious. The approach, whereby rich, polluting countries should compensate poor, non-polluting countries financially for the environmental and economic damage that they have caused by their carbon emissions, seems fair and laudable.
However, it raises the question as to how this will stop or reduce the rate of climate change.
Sadly, it could actually increase that rate, even if the financial compensation is used in the most sensible ways, for example by building pumping stations and reservoirs for clean water, constructing flood defence systems, and building roads, schools and hospitals.
It’s a fair assumption that very little of that work, if any, will be executed using so-called green energy; and most of the work will involve the use of concrete, a material whose use is estimated to be responsible for at least 8 per cent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.
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The real elephant in the room, which most leaders and planners inexplicably overlook, is global population growth.
Population growth was a hot topic in the 1950s and 1960s when the world’s population was about three billion; now it’s eight billion and currently growing at a rate of about 83 million a year, but few appear to give it serious consideration.
That level of growth might have been sustainable if we had all continued to live as we did in the 1950s, but we haven’t.
In the West, our aspirations have grown to the extent that we now regard such luxuries as cars, central heating, washing machines, televisions, and even foreign travel, as essentials – luxuries that were available to only a few not so long ago.
With globalisation, the developing world sees how the West lives and, not unnaturally, wishes to emulate it.
A sad and perhaps surprising reflection of this is that, according to a study published in the journal the Lancet, those individuals in developing countries who can afford a western lifestyle now account for 62 per cent of obese individuals globally.
Population growth and aspirations to a lifestyle that is simply not possible to achieve for the eight billion people on our planet combine to make a perfect storm of environmental destruction, accelerated climate change, human suffering and conflict over natural resources, all of which have been increasingly evident for several decades.
Rather than arguing about who owes how much to whom for damage that has already been done, Cop27 delegates ought to be concentrating their efforts on means of limiting further population growth, and radically addressing western lifestyle expectations.
It’s not just a question of paying off developing countries or of advocating the feel-good actions of buying an electric car, cycling to work or turning the central heating down a couple of degrees; the approach needs to be much more radical than that.
Despite the rhetoric, it seems that most of the Cop27 delegates have not yet grasped the enormity and complexity of the drivers of climate change, or the extent to which population growth and lifestyle aspirations contribute to that change. – Yours, etc,
SWITHUN GOODBODY,
Cappaghglass,
Co Cork.
