Developing Countries and Climate Change
Today, about 50 percent of global green house gas (GHG) emissions come from developing countries. GHG raises the temperature on our planet – therefore the global economy should decouple growth from emissions. In spite of that, it seems that there are plenty of countrywide programs aiming at the reduction of GHG emissions, but rarely international ones being implemented and driven out properly.
The time to act is now: Experts agreed that a temperature increase of 2 °C relative to pre-industrial levels would lead to impacts of climate change which would hardly be manageable. According to Nicholas Stern (-Review) global emissions would have to peak in 10 to 20 years and then annually fall by 6 to 10 % in order to meet these 2 °C. In fact, emissions grew by 3 % between 1950 and 2002.
We split our appointment with Dr. Pegels into two parts: an informal dialogue, which took about one hour, in which we raised most of our questions, and a formal interview in which we tried to cover the most important issues we discovered together. The time of the interview was limited to 10 minutes.
During the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali 2007, the northern nations committed to assist developing countries in reducing their GHG emissions by providing financial, but also technological support.
According to Dr. Pegels, the financed activities relate to two major focal areas: the first is “adaptation”, i.e. protection against unavoidable consequences of global climate change, where one of the funding sources is the Adaption Fund under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The second field is “mitigation”, that is the reduction of GHG emissions, financed inter alia by the two Climate Investment Funds (the Clean Technology Fund and the Strategic Climate Fund, administered by the World Bank). The resources currently available are not sufficient to cover the needs of climate change adaptation and mitigation, a fact that leads to heated debates in the climate change negotiations.
However, while providing appropriate financial flows already seems to be difficult enough, inducing effective technology transfer is even more complex. According to Dr. Pegels, most of the rights over clean technologies are in the hands of private players. They have to be incentivized – or, more controversial, forced – to transfer them to developing countries. Industrialized countries criticize the lack of a so called “enabling environment” in developing countries: legal security, intellectual property rights and good governance are seen as some of the prerequisites for private technology transfer. Indeed, developing countries should ensure their domestic conditions facilitate the absorption and deployment of clean technologies. Much can be done by supportive policy schemes such as renewable energy feed-in tariffs. Northern countries must support these schemes and in addition find mechanisms to incentivize their companies to cooperate more closely with developing countries. However, many developing countries not only require technology transfer, furthermore they want to build and strengthen their capacity to develop the needed technologies themselves. In most countries, this implies substantial capacity building and can only be realized in the medium to long term. Apart from market schemes, Dr. Pegels explained that publicly financed research centers in which industrialized as well as developing countries collaborate on the development of relevant technologies may be part of the solution.