The accidental environmentalists: Climate change in Latin America
More reasons to stop deforestation
The Economist print edition, Dec 11th 2008
MORE destructive hurricanes, shrinking forests, melting glaciers, disappearing animals: the prospective damage to Latin America and the Caribbean from climate change makes for grim reading. A new World Bank report, timed to coincide with a United Nations conference in Poland, tries to put numbers to the potential economic cost. (“Low Carbon, High Growth: Latin American Responses to Climate Change,” by Augusto de la Torre, Pablo Fajnzylber and John Nash.) By taking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s predictions for what the planet might feel like in 2100 and then overlaying data from several thousand farms situated in regions of varying heat and dryness, it is possible to make some informed guesses about what the effect on crop yields, and therefore on GDP, would be if temperatures rose and rainfall fell.
Some places in the southern cone of Latin America would gain from such a change. But more would lose out: the authors reckon that left unchecked, climate change might cause a fall of 12-50% in farm revenues by the end of the century. According to another study, this could mean an annual cut in GDP of 0.23-0.56%.
This would worsen rural poverty. It would also entail the shrinking of a number of habitats, whose eventual disappearance would in turn speed up the process of global warming. Four are in the front line: Mexico’s Gulf-coast wetlands; the Andean glaciers; parts of the Amazon; and Caribbean coral reefs (they expel tiny algae when sea temperatures rise, which eventually kills them). An increase in malaria in rural areas and dengue fever in cities completes a gloomy picture.
Some Latin American countries are already doing things to reduce net carbon emissions that put them ahead of governments elsewhere. Much of the region’s power comes from hydroelectricity and biofuels. The result is that emissions of carbon dioxide per unit of power are 74% lower than in India and China.
There are obstacles to taking these policies further. In Brazil, plans for more hydroelectric dams in the Amazon are opposed by some environmentalists; they claim the resulting flooding of forest prompts methane-producing rotting vegetation. Oil producers in the region stoke emissions by subsidising petrol: it is cheaper in Venezuela than anywhere except Kuwait.
But almost half of the region’s emissions come from changes in land use, as forests and grasslands are turned into farms. By contrast, this accounts for only 17% of emissions in the rest of the world. A report for the British government by (Lord) Nicholas Stern, an economist, identified these emissions as cheaper to prevent than most other kinds. Perhaps: “Lord Stern probably does not have a tropical forest to protect,” sniffs a Brazilian diplomat.
The economic downturn may make this harder, cutting government environmental spending. But a fall in the price of farm commodities may ease the pressure on the forest. Most of the governments with a toe in the Amazon now accept that they should seek foreign money for schemes to ensure that trees are worth more standing up than they are lying down. All that needs to be done is to find a way to make this work on the front line where the loggers meet the forest, and then to get the rest of the world to pay up.
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