Just joined the course

Dear all,



I have just joined the course and I have missed two class sessions so this weekend I have been trying to catch up on the missed reading assignments. This post is about this week's reading "Steve Review: The Economics of Climate Change."



General reflections on the human experience:

This article dicusses one of the critical dilemmas that human beings face all over the world - climate change is global and international collective action is critical for an effective and efficient response to this challenge. Climate change also is a challenge for economics as it is the widest ranging market failure ever seen. The changes can change the physical geography of the world which will affect where people live and how they live their lives. The risks of serious, irreversible impacts of climate change increase as the concentration of greenhouse gases rises in the atmosphere. In the higher latitudes cold realted deaths will increase but the climate change will increase worldwide deaths from malnutrition and heat. Diseases such as malaria and dengue fever will spread if steps are not taken to stop the effects of climate change. People will also become displaced because of rising sea levels, heavy floods and intense droughts. The poorest countries and people will suffer the earliest. Illness will increase in the poor countries and so will the death rate. In higher latitudes the countries will face the most rapid rates of warming. Emissions are affected by economic growth however the stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere is possible and consistent with continued growth. When estimating the costs of shifting from a high carbon to a low carbon trajectory one should consider that there will be an expected annual cost of emissions reductions consistent with a trajectory leading to stabilisation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Efforts to reduce emissions rapidly will be very costly in the beginning. However delay in taking action on climate change will make more negative changes in climate and would lead to higher mitigation costs. Costs of mitigation of around 1% of GDP are small when compared to the costs and risks of climate change which can be avoided. For the economy as a whole, there will be benefits from innovation which will reduce some of these costs. Climate policy if designed well, will lead to reducing ill health and mortality from air pollution and to the preservation of forests.



Policy to reduce emissions needs to be based on three essential elements which are carbon pricing, technology policy, and removal of barriers to behavioral change. Carbon price needs to be established through tax, trading or regulation. A range of low carbon and high efficiency technologies need to be developed. The challanege of adaptation is critical in developing countries as greater vulnerability and poverty reduce the capacity to act. International cooperation is needed to cover all aspects of policy to reduce emissions and leadership needs to be shown by different countries in different ways.



The transfer of technologies to developing countries by the private sector can be accelerated by international cooperation. Some countries have already taken the initiative like the Kyoto Protocol is currently the main channel for supporting low-carbon investment in developing countries. More money needs to be invested in low-carbon development paths. Stopping deforestation is also a highly cost-effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Adaptation efforts in developing countries needs to be accelerated and supported.



Ideas that relate to personal experience or interests:

Coming from a third world country, the ideas that the required changes are difficult to be implemented in third world countries resonate to me because I am from a third world country. In the developing countries there are such a vast number of pressing issues like poverty and wide spread disease that climate is something that policy makers or government will never think about. There is so much to be done now that looking ahead in the future of what affect the climate change will have on the lives of people is just too much for them to plan for. However the initiatives taken by the other developed countries in Asia like Japan to help the other countries to stop pollution on the roads by working on projects to implement this are really helpful. The Japanese have set up an office that works on such issues. They look at the rate of growing pollution on the roads and then they work on projects to make changes in the cars being developed in Pakistan and to introduce some cheap means on how can this be controlled.

The emphasis placed by the author on the fact that more needs to be done by the developed countries in this regard should be taken seriously or everyone will suffer. The idea that we are all in this together is nicely taken up even though the developing countries will be hit first of all by this crisis. In Pakistan there was a widespread of denegue fever a few months ago when I was there and right now the country is dealing with the crisis of bird flu so these things which have been predicted by the author as signs of climate change have already started happening.

I like the idea of how living in all these different countries and speaking so many different languages we are all tied together in one common thing - the planet earth.