Читать книгу Los retos del cambio climático - José Félix Pinto-Bazurco - Страница 7

The international community has been attempting to grapple with the problem of climate change for more than thirty years. In 1988 the United Nations created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and gave it the task of gathering and assessing the latest scientific knowledge. In 1992 the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was negotiated in Rio de Janeiro, and almost every country in the world ratified it. The UNFCCC set the objective of preventing dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system, but left it to later negotiations to decide how to achieve that objective.

The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 attempted to fulfill the UNFCCC’s goals by adopting a top-down approach, in which every developed country was required to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by a set percentage. However, the Kyoto Protocol failed. The largest emitting country at the time, the United States, never joined. The rapidly developing countries, including China (whose emissions surpassed those of the United States in the late 2000s) and India, were not required to control their emissions at all. Thus global emissions continued to rise.

A new approach was discussed at the UNFCCC’s conference in Copenhagen in 2009 and formally adopted in Paris in 2015. It was a bottom-up approach. Each country would put forward its own voluntary pledge for what it would do – a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC). These pledges would not be enforceable; international law has no process for imposing sanctions on countries that do not meet them. Moreover, even if every country fully implements its pledges, global temperatures would still rise dangerously, far above the levels that the Paris agreement decided would be tolerable. To make matters worse, the United States has indicated that it plans to withdraw from the Paris Agreement (though this decision might be reversed depending on the outcome of the next U.S. presidential election in November 2020).

And global greenhouse gas emissions and levels of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere continue to go up every year. The trend in global temperatures continues upward.

In sum, the international climate agreements are not solving the problem. After thirty years of effort, it has become clear that solutions must come from the actions of individual countries. The United Nations will not save us.

Thus Jose F. Pinto-Bazurco’s book is an extremely important contribution. It focuses, in far greater depth than ever before, on the climate change efforts of one country, Peru, and also discusses in detail the NDCs, climate impacts, and political, institutional and legal frameworks in Chile, Colombia and Mexico.

The exhaustive documentation and careful analysis in this book will be helpful to policy makers, lawyers, and scholars not only in Peru and the three other countries studied, but throughout Latin America. Every country is working to adopt and carry out its own programs to fight climate change. They will all benefit from what this book teaches about what has been created or attempted in these four states.

This is not to say that the international efforts are irrelevant. Most of the countries of Latin America are still growing their economies, and they depend heavily on international arrangements to provide financial support for their own efforts. Most of these countries will also participate in the mechanisms being established pursuant to the Paris Climate Agreement to receive credits for their greenhouse gas reductions from wealthier countries. This book will also help the Latin American countries navigate these complex programs.

The book highlights one especially important shortcoming in Peru’s approach. Unlike other countries in Latin America, Peru does not have a national adaptation plan. The most recent reports from the IPCC and many other scientific institutions have shown that even under the most optimistic scenarios, global temperatures will continue to rise for many years to come, and climate impacts will grow worse. Thus adaptation measures are the most important actions that can be taken by countries like Peru, which will suffer adverse consequences from climate change but themselves make only very small contributions to global greenhouse gas emissions. Hopefully this book will spur greater action in Peru to move forward with plans to prepare for the climate impacts that are coming, and it will help officials in Peru see what has already been adopted by other countries in Latin America.

Michael B. Gerrard Andrew Sabin Professor of Professional Practice Faculty Director, Sabin Center for Climate Change Law Columbia Law School