What are the implications of climate change for development?

Résumé du document

The phenomenon of climate change is as old as the planet earth itself. For ages, the temperature at the surface of the earth has varied, triggering many different climatic eras: Earth has hitherto known five ice ages, and the first of them is estimated to have happened around 2.4 to 2.1 billion years ago. However, the scientific community proved that mankind has now to face an unprecedented acceleration of such change. What is called in the public opinion "global warming" is the manifestation of such acceleration.

The consequences are so far dramatic, and the examples numerous, the melt of the icecap being the most obvious. Finally, a consensus about the explanation of such change has been reached, albeit many sceptical theories also exist. This is to be correlated with the technological explosion known by mankind during the 20th century, especially through a blossoming industrialization. Thanks to such progresses, the world is now globalized. However, such development was not uniform; some countries are still trying to catch up on the developed countries of the northern hemisphere. They are trying to improve their level of development as the developed world did earlier.

The notion of development is actually very wide: this essay will focus on the economic and technological ways of development, such as growth and industrialization, aiming to end the poverty. Such economic boom has been successfully achieved in the past century the states which are now the leaders of the globalized world. But as the climate change shows it, it is actually impossible for any country to develop in their way without a considerable impact for the environment. Mankind thus has to cope with this new challenge in her seek for improvement.

Extraits

[...] One example would be an unequal access to healthcare facilities while new illnesses are likely to appear especially because of the temperature increase. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has established that the current seasonal illnesses (such as the flu) are about to mutate and evolve because of climate change, and that the frequency and location of some illnesses are about to shift towards developed countries (Nagel et al., 2008). Climate change would thus affect the human beings individually. There is a strong perception in the public opinion that climate change is only a matter of northerners firms and government. [...]

[...] The conclusion that must be drawn is that a higher level of cooperation can only be reached through a more efficient allocation of the information. Such cooperation is actually possible, even considering the game theory: “People are trapped by the Prisoner's Dilemma only if they treat themselves as prisoners by passively accepting the suboptimum strategy” (Olstrom, 1990). It is actually possible to act on the international scene to favor the cooperation between states. It has been done for the free trade thanks to the WTO. [...]

[...] The explanation can be found in the game theory. In this theory, the protagonists of a cooperation game are stuck in a prisoner dilemma, and may not have incentives to cooperate with each other, because they may fear to come out with the “sucker payoff”, the worst possible outcome of the agreement. Therefore, regarding climate change, actors of a possible cooperation tend to behave as rational selfish individuals. One example of such behaviour is a recent study ran by Sammy Zahran at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. [...]

[...] Therefore the information has to be efficiently spread within the society. The actual summits for the Earth which are gathering about once a year are always a big deal of information in the world medias. However, their conclusions are not always spread throughout the society, making their impact almost non-existent. So, settling for a simple improvement of the cooperation between states will not make the situation any better within those states. According to Jeffrey Broadbent, only solution lies in a level of global cooperation that humanity as never seen before” (Smith, 2009). [...]

[...] This is an observable consequence of the globalisation of climate change as a global issue linking the developed and developing worlds. Hence, climate change is a threat for development in both developing and developed countries. As a consequence, one may argue that developing countries are related to the already developed ones in the globalized world, and so are they for the environmental question. Nonetheless, the conclusions that will be drawn are very unlikely to be identic in those two worlds. [...]