The Hindu Business Line : Development in peril

The developing economies will have to put their act together, not only to improve their human development indices but also to make growth more efficient.

This year’s UN Human Development Report is different from the earlier ones in that it focusses on the effects of climate change on the larger development processes and warns that unless effective steps are taken to combat what is happening on the greenhouse gas emissions front, natural disasters such as droughts, floods and storms “will become more frequent and intense”. The report states that for the 2.6 billion people on the planet surviving on less th an $2 a day, the destructive forces unleashed by the process of climate-change would “stall and then reverse progress built up over generations”.

The report urges developed countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, from the 1990 levels, by at least 80 per cent by 2050 and 30 per cent by 2020. For developing countries, however, a single target of a 30 per cent reduction by 2050 has been suggested. The problem is that efforts to reduce gas emissions have been unacceptably sluggish. In fact, the policy resolve of the international community has been so weak that it will take a long time to put in place the climate change protocol to succeed the Kyoto mechanism, which terminates in 2012. The writing on the wall is, however, clear; in the absence of corrective efforts, it is the developing world which will suffer the earliest, the “near-term vulnerabilities” being concentrated in the flood-prone Bangladesh and drought-prone parts of sub-Saharan Africa. The report also refers to the extreme inequalities in “adaptation capacities” with the rich investing heavily in “climate-change defence systems” and the poor, as the Nobel laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, puts it, “being left to sink or swim with their own resources”. What is apparent is that if countries such as India are to fight the climate change threat to their development efforts in the spheres of literacy, public health and income-generation (important indices featuring in the Human Development Report), they need to raise their production efficiency by investing in clean technology. Adequate external assistance is required for this, a point readily acknowledged by the report.

Since the planet’s climate is indivisible, no individual country can hope to do enough to control the adverse effects of climate change on its own economy. A global approach to the problem is, therefore, mandatory. Among other things, the report states that the rich will have to make “the deepest and earliest cuts” in greenhouse gas emissions because they carry “the overwhelming historic responsibility for the problem, have far deeper carbon footprints, and have the financial and technological capabilities to act”. But the developing economies too will have to put their act together, not only to improve their human development indices but also to make growth more efficient. After all, even without the climate change threat, the use of less energy to produce a unit of output would be a sensible target to pursue because it would mean more efficient production leading to a higher overall growth rate.