Examination of Witnesses (Questions 76
- 79)
TUESDAY 29 JANUARY 2002
DR BENITO
MÜLLER AND
DR SALEEMUL
HUQ
Chairman
76. Good morning, gentlemen. Thank you for
the very full written submissions. The questions that we want
to ask you today are in the sense of further and better particulars
from those submissions. Dr Huq, you argue that helping to build
the adaptive capacity of communities for dealing with extreme
events should have a beneficial effect for strengthening adaptive
capacity for future climate change. Often the measures to deal
with extreme events in communities are based around developing
early warning systems, building flood defences or providing life
saving measures like cyclone shelters. How does this help address
longer term vulnerability or is the point more to do with building
the necessary institutions and capacity that can address both
extreme climate events and longer term climate changes?
(Dr Huq) I think we need to do both.
If you look at the history of dealing with particularly extreme
climate events and the rehabilitation work that goes on afterwards
they tend to concentrate on just reproducing the status quo before
the event as it were—rebuilding the houses, the roads, whatever
infrastructure was damaged, without giving a lot of thought to
preventing or coping with such events in future. Part of the work
that needs to go into coping with extreme climatic related hazards
has to be in building the capacity to cope with them in future
which includes both early warning as well as institutional capacities
at many levels—national levels of relief agencies or hazard
warning agencies as well as in local communities for them to be
able to cope with it. There have been examples of this in my country,
for example, Bangladesh, where we had a major cyclone which killed
over 100,000 people, you may recall, in 1991. Since then there
have been a lot of efforts at improving early warning systems
and building cyclone shelters. We had a similar sized cyclone
in 1997 which only killed about 30 or 40 people. I would ascribe
that in large part to people being much better prepared for the
event that occurred at that time.
77. In your memorandum you argue for strengthening
the capacity of institutions and civil society to adapt to climate
change. What kinds of measures need to be taken at local, national
and regional levels, what support should donors like DFID play
and which donor agencies have demonstrated significant leadership?
(Dr Huq) If I can give you another example from my
country, Bangladesh, with respect to floods, we had, as you may
recall, in 1987 and 1998 two very big floods which caused a lot
of damage and loss of life, after which the entire donor community
got together and tried to invest in developing flood protection
for Bangladesh. There was this major activity called the Flood
Action Plan which at that time I and my institution based in Bangladesh
had opposed because we did not feel that that was necessarily
the right way to go. It was simply an engineering driven vision
of trying to dam up the country and prevent these floods from
occurring. Our argument was that first of all that was not a feasible
option; secondly, even if it was technically feasible it was not
commercially feasible: there was not the money to do it; and thirdly,
it was much better to invest in much softer options, such as improving
the early warning systems, improving communities' abilities to
deal with floods. Again these things were done and a major flood
which occurred in 1998 did not cause as much damage as had been
expected because people and communities had been empowered. DFID
has been a major contributor to this softer option approach which
many of the other international agencies like the World Bank have
not supported. They have taken a much more engineering approach
to the question.
78. You argue in your paper for there to
be an allocation of emission targets on a per capita basis, but
is it not right that by 2015 emissions from developing countries
are likely to exceed those from the developed world? Therefore
is there not a danger that developing countries could become complacent
about emissions?
(Dr Huq) I will let my colleague answer the question
in more detail but I will just make one point there. Even if the
developing country emissions become much larger, as they are predicted
to do in the next few decades, if you calculate those on a per
capita basis for countries like China and India they are going
to be orders of magnitude smaller than those for the West, and
particularly for countries like Bangladesh, which has very low
emissions to start with and a very high population right now,
our per capita emissions are almost zero in comparison to the
rest of the world.
(Dr Müller) I have to say that I am not an expert
on impacts but I have worked on the international regime which
has focused so far on mitigation mainly. With regard to this issue
of the second commitment period targets, and these of course are
on the table, I think one has quite clearly to say that allocating
these permits, these targets, for countries is a matter of allocating
a common asset. It is establishing property rights for something
and there are different ways of doing it. You can do grandfathering,
you can just say, "We have them already", or you can
say, "No, there are no property rights involved; we all have
equal rights to it". It is not a matter of responsibility
in all these things. If you want to make policy decisions about
who ought to do what and when then you really have to look at
per capita emissions, not at country groupings. If you start comparing
country groupings then Switzerland, for example, would never have
to do anything at all because the rest of the world emits always
more. If you want policy decisions, who has to start with something?
It is like wealth comparison. If your policy depends on the richer
starting to do something you do not do it in absolute terms. It
would be ridiculous to say that Switzerland does not have to do
anything because they have 50 times less GDP than the US. In order
to look at these allocations of assigned amounts you have to look
at per capita emissions. There of course all of the developing
countries are still much less culpable than we are.
Mr Robathan
79. Taking the per capita emissions basis
and the fact that people in developing countries are less culpable
than the rest of us, that is all very well but that does not actually
affect the global warming as a whole.
(Dr Müller) It does, with respect.
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