In the context of the current pandemic one of the key priorities advanced by the international community was the need to attain a “green recovery” from the global economic downturn. In particular, the IMF and other international organizations singled out environmental policy and the vision of a “green recovery” as the key gateway to overcoming the economic crisis. The good news is that in 2021 the global economy has in fact exhibited signs of emphatic growth, with the IMF projecting global growth to reach 6% in 2021 and 4.9% in 2022. This upturn in economic activity is accompanied by sizeable measures undertaken by governments, corporates and regional authorities to prioritize environmental/green development.
An important possible consequence of these trends may be that green/environmental policies may become part of the economic policy tool-kit just as the ESG agenda is becoming increasingly prevalent at the corporate level.
At the macroeconomic level “green policy” may be an important source of economic stimulus as the transition to clean energy necessitates substantial investment into infrastructure and technology. In this respect “green policy” may also serve as a platform for international economic policy coordination particularly during periods of downturns. This “green stimulus” may be counter-cyclical during downturns, while during upswings green policies in the form of higher taxation may dampen the excesses of recovery. In a way carbon taxes just as incomes taxes for individuals act as an “automatic stabilizer” with lower tax burden during economic downturns compensated by elevated taxation during upswings.
Importantly, “green policies” may also serve to extend investment time-horizons and render the economic policy framework more long-term focused. This could involve for example the budget process taking into account longer term risks associated with global warming as well as medium- and long-term outlays that are needed to meet environmental goals.
At the micro-level of companies the ESG agenda is already leading corporates towards superior governance practices, including with respect to the transparency and regularity of financial reporting. All this has important positive implications for the efficiency of macroeconomic policies that crucially depend on the reliability and transparency of financial reporting at the micro-level. There may be related elements of green policies in the prudential regulation for the Central Banks as the regulator will increasingly need to allocate greater risk weights in setting prudential norms to banks exposed to sectors/corporates with poor environmental track-record.
There will also be implications for the external economic policy of countries emanating from the rising prominence of the “green agenda”. “Green alliances” may emerge on the basis of de novo accords concluded on the basis of key environmental priorities that bring countries together. Or the basis for environmental accords can also be rooted in the existing network of free-trade agreements that are complemented by “green chapters” that set out the priorities for cooperation in the environmental sphere. Some of the FTA accords are already incorporating new chapters on environmental cooperation such as the Mercosur-EU accord.
Regional integration blocs and other regional arrangements will have an important role to play in the propagation of such environmental accords as the level of national states does not cope well with the spill-over effects and region-wide trans-border issues that are inherent in the environmental agenda.
Another element related to the green policy agenda will be “green protectionism”. Defensive measures will likely become more green — a trend that is already observed at the national level. At the same time, rather than attempting to resort to the WTO to counter such protectionism, a more efficient approach is likely to involve the creation of a more resilient regulatory framework governing environmental standards at the national, regional and corporate levels.
The green agenda is also likely to add to the divergence of national economic models in terms of the centrality of such factors as economic sustainability and prioritization of high growth rates. On this important count the Nordic model of economic development that has proven to be so successful in the past crises, already incorporates the ESG and the green policy agenda at the macro-level — something that may render the Nordic model even more attractive and competitive in the years to come.
In the end, the green agenda will serve as a major transformational force for economic policies across countries, with new possibilities emerging for industrial policies to support growth as well as new national and regional models of economic modernization. Furthermore, the green economy may serve as a spring-board to modernization just as in the past this role has been played by manufacturing. The multiplier effect coming from developing the foundations of the green economy surpasses mere inter-sectoral effects and encompasses factors such as greater capability of countries to forge ahead with integration into the global economy.
The theme of this year’s Earth Day is “Planet vs. Plastics” – a theme chosen to raise awareness of the damage done by plastic to humans, animals and the planet and to promote policies aiming to reduce global plastic production by 60 percent by 2040.
As our chart shows, global plastics use has increased rapidly over the past few decades, growing 250 percent since 1990 to reach 460 million tonnes in 2019, according to the OECD’s Global Plastics Outlook, which projects another 67-percent increase in global plastics use by 2040 and for the world’s annual plastic use to exceed one billion tonnes by 2052. As our chart shows, packaging is the largest driver of global plastics use, which is why a rapid phasing out of all single use plastics by 2030 is one of the policy measures proposed under EARTHDAY.ORG’s 60X40 framework.
Other major applications of plastics include building and construction, transportation as well as textiles, with the fast fashion industry particularly guilty of adding to the world’s plastic footprint. “The fast fashion industry annually produces over 100 billion garments,” the Earth Day organizers write. “Overproduction and overconsumption have transformed the industry, leading to the disposability of fashion. People now buy 60 percent more clothing than 15 years ago, but each item is kept for only half as long.” Most importantly, the organization points out that 85 percent of disposed garments end up in landfills or incinerators, while just 1 percent are being recycled.
Felix Richter is a Data Journalist
This article was first published in the Statista.com.
Algeria’s Tassili N’Ajjer plateau is Africa’s largest national park. Among its vast sandstone formations is perhaps the world’s largest art museum. Over 15,000 etchings and paintings are exhibited there, some as much as 11,000 years old according to scientific dating techniques, representing a unique ethnological and climatological record of the region.
Curiously, however, these images do not depict the arid, barren landscape that is present in the Tassili N’Ajjer today. Instead, they portray a vibrant savannah inhabited by elephants, giraffes, rhinos and hippos. This rock art is an important record of the past environmental conditions that prevailed in the Sahara, the world’s largest hot desert.
These images depict a period approximately 6,000-11,000 years ago called the Green Sahara or North African Humid Period. There is widespread climatological evidence that during this period the Sahara supported wooded savannah ecosystems and numerous rivers and lakes in what are now Libya, Niger, Chad and Mali.
This greening of the Sahara didn’t happen once. Using marine and lake sediments, scientists have identified over 230 of these greenings occurring about every 21,000 years over the past eight million years. These greening events provided vegetated corridors which influenced species’ distribution and evolution, including the out-of-Africa migrations of ancient humans.
These dramatic greenings would have required a large-scale reorganisation of the atmospheric system to bring rains to this hyper arid region. But most climate models haven’t been able to simulate how dramatic these events were.
As a team of climate modellers and anthropologists, we have overcome this obstacle. We developed a climate model that more accurately simulates atmospheric circulation over the Sahara and the impacts of vegetation on rainfall.
We identified why north Africa greened approximately every 21,000 years over the past eight million years. It was caused by changes in the Earth’s orbital precession – the slight wobbling of the planet while rotating. This moves the Northern Hemisphere closer to the sun during the summer months.
This caused warmer summers in the Northern Hemisphere, and warmer air is able to hold more moisture. This intensified the strength of the West African Monsoon system and shifted the African rainbelt northwards. This increased Saharan rainfall, resulting in the spread of savannah and wooded grassland across the desert from the tropics to the Mediterranean, providing a vast habitat for plants and animals.
Our results demonstrate the sensitivity of the Sahara Desert to changes in past climate. They explain how this sensitivity affects rainfall across north Africa. This is important for understanding the implications of present-day climate change (driven by human activities). Warmer temperatures in the future may also enhance monsoon strength, with both local and global impacts.
Earth’s changing orbit
The fact that the wetter periods in north Africa have recurred every 21,000 years or so is a big clue about what causes them: variations in Earth’s orbit. Due to gravitational influences from the moon and other planets in our solar system, the orbit of the Earth around the sun is not constant. It has cyclic variations on multi-thousand year timescales. These orbital cycles are termed Milankovitch cycles; they influence the amount of energy the Earth receives from the sun.
On 100,000-year cycles, the shape of Earth’s orbit (or eccentricity) shifts between circular and oval, and on 41,000 year cycles the tilt of Earth’s axis varies (termed obliquity). Eccentricity and obliquity cycles are responsible for driving the ice ages of the past 2.4 million years.
The third Milankovitch cycle is precession. This concerns Earth’s wobble on its axis, which varies on a 21,000 year timescale. The similarity between the precession cycle and the timing of the humid periods indicates that precession is their dominant driver. Precession influences seasonal contrasts, increasing them in one hemisphere and reducing them in another. During warmer Northern Hemisphere summers, a consequent increase in north African summer rainfall would have initiated a humid phase, resulting in the spread of vegetation across the region.
Eccentricity and the ice sheets
In our study we also identified that the humid periods did not occur during the ice ages, when large glacial ice sheets covered much of the polar regions. This is because these vast ice sheets cooled the atmosphere. The cooling countered the influence of precession and suppressed the expansion of the African monsoon system.
The ice ages are driven by the eccentricity cycle, which determines how circular Earth’s orbit is around the sun. So our findings show that eccentricity indirectly influences the magnitude of the humid periods via its influence on the ice sheets. This highlights, for the first time, a major connection between these distant high latitude and tropical regions.
The Sahara acts as a gate. It controls the dispersal of species between north and sub-Saharan Africa, and in and out of the continent. The gate was open when the Sahara was green and closed when deserts prevailed. Our results reveal the sensitivity of this gate to Earth’s orbit around the sun. They also show that high latitude ice sheets may have restricted the dispersal of species during the glacial periods of the last 800,000 years.
Our ability to model the African humid periods helps us understand the alternation of humid and arid phases. This had major consequences for the dispersal and evolution of species, including humans, within and out of Africa. Furthermore, it provides a tool for understanding future greening in response to climate change and its environmental impact.
Refined models may, in the future, be able to identify how climate warming will influence rainfall and vegetation in the Sahara region, and the wider implications for society.
Edward Armstrong is a postdoctoral research fellow, University of Helsinki
A new draft text on global stocktake has been published at the UN climate summit, COP28 UAE, on Wednesday morning. While the draft text does not contain the words “phase out”, it includes reference to transitioning away from all fossil fuels to enable the world to reach net zero by 2050.
The text published by the UN’s climate body calls on parties to accelerate and substantially reduce non-carbon dioxide emissions worldwide with a focus on reducing methane emissions by 2030. “We all want to get the most ambitious outcome possible,” Majid Al Suwaidi, COP28 Director-General, said on Tuesday.
The text, published early Wednesday, does not specifically refer to oil, but mentions the need to ‘phase-down’ coal. It says that it recognises the need for ‘deep, rapid and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in line with 1.5C pathways and calls on Parties to contribute to global efforts.
Among those efforts it recognises the need to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030 and doubling the annual rate of energy efficiency improvements by the same date. It also recognises the need to accelerate the phase-down of coal and accelerate towards net zero energy systems, utilising zero or low carbon fuels by mid century.
While the document does not mention oil or combustion engines, it does recognises the need for accelerating the reduction of emissions from road transport on a range of pathways, including through development of infrastructure and rapid deployment of zero and low-emission vehicles. It also recognises the need to phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that do not address energy poverty or just transitions, as soon as possible.
Finance specifics
On the subject of finance, the document said developed countries should continue to take the lead in mobilising climate finance from a wide variety of sources, instruments and channels, noting the significant role of public funds, through a variety of actions, including supporting country-driven strategies, and taking into account the needs and priorities of developing countries.
Such mobilisation of climate finance should represent a progression beyond previous efforts, the text said. It may provide small comfort to campaigners from developing countries who implored Parties to begin the phase out of fossil fuels and provide vastly improved access to funding for renewables.
The document highlights the persistent gap and challenges in technology development and transfer and the uneven pace of adoption of climate technologies around the world.
It further urges Parties to address these barriers and strengthen cooperative action, including with non-Party stakeholders, particularly with the private sector, to rapidly scale up the deployment of existing technologies, the fostering of innovation and the development and transfer of new technologies.
It also emphasizes the ongoing challenges faced by many developing country Parties in accessing climate finance and encourages further efforts, including by the operating entities of the Financial Mechanism, to simplify access to such finance, in particular for those developing country Parties that have significant capacity constraints, such as the least developed countries and small island developing States.
