Climate Change and Sustainable Development

Prospects for Developing Countries

Anil Markandya, Kirsten Halsnaes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000446890
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economía
• Subtopic: Teoría económica

'Makes a substantial contribution to the practical, effective analysis of climate change mitigation options in developing countries.'Development And Cooperation'The book is an excellent exercise and a good source of detailed information, and a basis for further discussions. Any person interested in this major environmental problem should read it.'International Journal of Environment and Pollution'Markandya and Halsnaes' collection is thoughtfully put together and can be recommended to all the practitioners in the fields of climate change and sustainable development.'The Journal of Energy LiteratureThis text argues that the policies pursued by developing countries will be crucial in determining the progress of climate change. Many are industrializing rapidly and the largest, particularly China and India, could have an impact at least as significant as that of the already industrialized economies - the reason given by President Bush for taking the US out of the Kyoto Protocol. The future of sustainable development in large measure depends on developing countries. This book develops a pragmatic framework for evaluating the climate change options faced by each developing country, depending on their individual circumstances. It assesses present methods, suggests how these might be improved, and proposes ways in which social and developmental aspects can be taken into account. Its discussion of the issues and the methods presented contribute to the practical analysis of climate change mitigation options in developing countries. The book should be useful to professionals, governments, international organizations and environmental groups working on climate change issues; as well as researchers, academics and students in economics, environmental and development studies and international affairs.

Chapter 1

Climate Change and Sustainable Development: An Overview

Anil Markandya and Kirsten Halsnaes

BACKGROUND

Climate change has been universally recognized as a global problem. While, historically, the preponderance of greenhouse gas emissions have been in developed countries, emissions will increase rapidly with expected and needed economic growth in developing countries. Yet, in the years since the constitution of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992, global cooperation on climate change has not developed adequately and the discussion on how to address climate change in the longer term has become polarized. The principal reason for this lack of progress is that in developing countries, climate change is not an important focus of economic or development policy and only recently has it been considered among national environmental policy objectives. Climate change remains too marginal compared to the pressing issues of food security, poverty, natural resource management, energy needs and access, or urban transport or land use to capture the attention of leading actors. Various parties to the UNFCCC, as well as independent scientific analysis, have reiterated that strong and inclusive global cooperation that integrates sustainable development and climate change policy objectives will be needed to address these global environmental issues.

Research on the relationship between climate change policies and those of sustainable development is an emerging international research issue. To date, research in this area has included a broad range of issues, covering development, the social and environmental dimensions of climate change and sustainable development. The focus particularly has been on how to facilitate a global climate change policy that both meets the objectives of sustainable development and, at the same time, is based on a broad consensus between stakeholders in industrialized countries, countries with economies in transition and developing countries.

The focus of this book is on a subset of these issues – namely, on the relationship between general sustainable development policies and climate change strategies in developing countries. In this context sustainable development policies are important in determining future greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the potential and related costs of climate change mitigation policies. At the same time, climate change policies have a number of impacts on sustainable development policy objectives.

Current international climate change policies have been uniquely driven by global environmental policy concerns, and very little attention has been given to local development and the environmental impacts of specific policies. However, from the local perspective, ancillary benefits of climate change policies, such as increased energy efficiency and the health impacts of local air pollution, may be significant and may therefore be very important in promoting local action. These local policy impacts, however, have not so far been addressed appropriately in climate change policy analysis. This is in contrast to the evidence from many ongoing national development programmes that demonstrates that energy efficiency improvements and other climate favouring activities emerge as side-benefits of sound development programmes. Price reforms, agricultural soil protection, sustainable forestry, energy sector restructuring – all undertaken without any reference to climate change mitigation or adaptation – have had substantial effects on the growth rates of GHG emissions. This observation suggests that it may often be possible to build environmental and climate policy upon development priorities that are vitally important to decision-makers. Furthermore, it opens the perspective that climate change policies may be seen not as a burden to be avoided but as a potential side-benefit of sound and internationally supported development strategies.

As mentioned above, sustainable development is a broad concept that encompasses a wide range of issues relating to development, equity and environmental policy aspects. The international literature includes several hundred alternative definitions of the concept of sustainable development. The aim of this book is not to be comprehensive in addressing the various aspects and understandings of sustainable development, but rather to contribute to the development of a methodological framework for and a practical approach to assessing the sustainable development impacts of GHG emission-reduction projects. Some of the key methodological issues involved in developing a framework for assessing the sustainable development impacts of GHG emission-reduction policies are outlined and discussed. The focus is primarily on the development of a practical basis for assessing projects in developing countries. The book addresses a number of issues that are relevant to the establishment of an international policy regime, including the issues covered by the UNFCCC that facilitate the implementation of policies in developing countries that both reduce GHG emissions and support sustainable development policy objectives.

The core analysis in this book is based on economic methods, but links to sociology, ethics and technology assessments are established. There is an extended debate about the methods of analysis that are most suitable for studying sustainability, and generally there is a recognition that the different disciplines cannot stand alone. Broadly speaking, economics contributes to the evaluation of the efficiency of different mitigation policies, and to the careful assessment of the costs of the policies, while the sustainability concept addresses a number of issues that are more closely linked to, for example, moral and political judgements, in particular intra- and intergenerational equity. Sociological methods emerge as important in dealing with institutional issues, and multi-criteria assessment approaches help us to understand how to rank options when several objectives are relevant and when uncertainty plays a major part.

As noted above, the decision-making approach applied here is primarily a technical paradigm inspired by economics but structured to have an interface with broader decision-making approaches. Accordingly, some sort of decision-making process is presumed to exist for the selection and valuation of national priorities in the context of sustainable development objectives.¹ The methods suggested in this book are intended to support the political decision-making process largely by ensuring that it results in choices that have some internal consistency. It is on this background that sustainability indicators are specified and assessed in a way that is consistent with evaluation approaches like cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA), cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and multicriteria analysis (MCA).² The use of such approaches for integrated assessment of various policy impacts is discussed, among others, by Kirkpatrick and Lee (1998 and 2000).

The point of departure for this book is the existing literature on sustainable development, much of which, it is widely recognized, is rather conceptual and ‘macro’ in its orientation. It has been developed to address global intergenerational resource allocation and equity aspects that are very general in nature. Hence it offers little in the way of advice at the project or programme level, except in a rather ad hoc way, and there is a ‘gap’ between the general scope of the literature and the specific issues that are relevant in relation to small-scale policy efforts like GHG emission-reduction projects. The sustainable development consequences of small-scale policy efforts, like projects, are difficult to track and to separate from other factors that are influencing the larger systems. The approach taken by the authors, therefore, is to suggest a number of sustainable development indicators of projects and programmes and to look at the implications of using this information as input for policy evaluation. The suggested indicators are not intended to be comprehensive but can be considered as useful ‘pointers’ to the sustainable development implications of policies.

Finally, it is important to recognize that an integrated assessment of the economic, environmental and social sustainability dimensions of policies is very complicated and resource-demanding. The recommendation is thus to balance methodological sophistication, availability of analytical skills and data, and the strong requirement to facilitate a transparent analysis and decision-making process. In this way a relatively simple initial approach is recommended, where a small number of impact indicators are assessed based on a well-established methodological approach.

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

The book is structured as follows. Chapter 2 provides an introduction to the general literature on sustainable development, including its conceptual foundations, and looks at its implications for climate change mitigation and how it can be applied to the climate change debate, especially at the project level. Chapter 3 starts from a review of the literature on sustainable development and climate change, which, interestingly, has rather different roots from the theoretical literature reviewed in Chapter 2. It also reports on some of the measured impacts of climate change mitigation projects that reflect their broader sustainable development contributions and draws some conclusions. Chapter 4 is devoted to addressing the social capital aspects of climate change projects and assessing how they can be measured in a way that is consistent with the other dimensions. Chapter 5 reviews different rules for the formal ranking of climate change mitigation projects and reports on their application in a case study for Botswana. These rules are applied in a context that incorporates at least some of the sustainability indicators of interest. Chapter 6 focuses on the equity dimension; the different ways in which it arises in the sustainability context and how it can be made operational. Some numerical calculations are reported for the same case study as in Chapter 5 – Botswana. Chapter 7 reports on the extended mitigation cost analysis that is applied to four countries – Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mauritius and Thailand. Finally, Chapter 8 provides two more case studies carried out using different methods of assessment. The first is from Brazil, which uses a more judgemental approach and the second is from India, which uses multicriteria analysis.

CHAPTER 2: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYSING CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE CONTEXT OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

This chapter provides a discussion of the conceptual foundations of sustainable development and then derives some local level indicators of sustainability. The literature defines three dimensions to sustainability – economic, environmental and social. Each of these can be thought of as being ‘capital’ stocks, which can be used sustainably – ie, in such a way that overall stocks are not allowed to decline; or can be used in an unsustainable way, which means that the stocks are allowed to deteriorate or to be consumed over time.

Indicators exist at the national level that attempt to measure the economic dimension of sustainability based on this notion. These indicators are classified as reflecting weak sustainability or strong sustainability. The difference between the two is that weak sustainability assumes that different forms of capital can be substituted along a sustainable path. Strong sustainability, on the other hand, assumes that substitution between, for example, man-made capital and natural capital is very limited. The chapter discusses the rules and indicators that have been developed in the literature for both weak and strong sustainability.

Applying these concepts at a local level is possible but requires the measures to be made operational. The chapter describes how the concepts of strong and weak sustainability can indeed be made operational in the context of a project, and from this a wide range of indicators is developed, most of which are in the literature on sustainability at the local level, but some of which are not.

The discussion of indicators is organized around the following criteria: data availability, theoretical rationale, presence of a time dimension and relevance to projects. As a general point, specific indicators will apply in specific cases and we cannot offer generic advice for all projects. Nevertheless, some general conclusions can be drawn:

1 The environmental indicators of greatest value are:

• changes in water and air pollutants accompanying the GHG mitigation project;

• changes in the use of raw materials and minerals accompanying the same;

• changes in sustainable or unsustainable forestry practices induced by the projects;

• an important indirect indicator is the impact on the use of renewable energy in the country.

2 The time dimension is important in most of the key indicators.

3 On the socioeconomic indicators, the most important direct impacts are those on employment and food supply (in sequestration projects). The most relevant indirect impacts are on productivity and regional value added. A useful innovative indicator is the contribution of the project to genuine savings, although this has yet to be implemented through empirical studies.

4 The indicators of social acceptability and social capital are not indicators in the usual sense of the term because they are difficult to link to individual projects. Their main usefulness is as a guide to appropriate prior ‘operating conditions’ for the projects. Ideally, we should ensure that these conditions (for example, a management plan, high social mobility, good horizontal networks, etc) are present. The question then arises, what if they are not? Projects undertaken in the absence of what we will call ‘good reference operating conditions’ will need further support if they are to be successful. This issue is raised again later in the book.

The indicators discussed in the chapter cover a wide range of impacts and it is not expected that all projects will use all of them. One of the areas of further work is to provide more guidance on where particular indicators should be used. The discussion provides, however, a useful ‘shopping list’ of indicators, based on the most recent literature on the subject.

CHAPTER 3: A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ON CLIMATE CHANGE AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

The application of the sustainable development concept to climate change studies has thrown up a number of theoretical and practical complexities. These are related to the very broad policy agenda that sustainable development is trying to address and to the very ambitious scope of the work. This scope is formulated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report (IPCC TAR) (Banuri et al, 2001) as enabling the assessment of the synergies and tradeoffs involved in the pursuit of multiple goals – ie, environmental conservation, social equity, economic growth and poverty eradication. The review in this chapter does not identify any studies that address the broad range of sustainability policy objectives and how they can be integrated in climate change mitigation studies, but it identifies a number of studies that mak...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures, Tables and Boxes
• List of Contributors
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• 1 Climate Change and Sustainable Development: An Overview
• 2 A Conceptual Framework for Analysing Climate Change in the Context of Sustainable Development
• 3 A Review of the Literature on Climate Change and Sustainable Development
• 4 Assessing Social Capital Aspects of Climate Change Projects
• 5 Analytical Approaches for Decision-making, Sustainable Development and Greenhouse Gas Emission-reduction Policies
• 6 Sustainability in Climate Mitigation: Integrating Equity into Project Analysis
• 7 Case Studies for Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mauritius and Thailand
• 8 The CDM and Sustainable Development: Case Studies from Brazil and India
• Index