Peer reviewed analysis from world leading experts

Debunking Australia’s excuse for climate inaction

Reading Time: 5 mins
A kangaroo stands in front of the remains of a burnt down house, destroyed during the bushfire season, in the community of Wytaliba, New South Wales, Australia, 29 January 2020 (Photo: Reuters/Jorge Silva).

In Brief

It is rare for heads of government to portray their countries as irrelevant. But this is how Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison described his country’s role in global climate action amid its worst fire season on record. His argument is that because Australia accounts for just 1.3 per cent of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, any action it takes is too small to influence global outcomes.

Share

  • A
  • A
  • A

Share

  • A
  • A
  • A

This is selective accounting. Australians are on track to suffer 12–24 times more of the damages from climate change than the global average. This exceptional vulnerability is Australia’s strongest incentive to accelerate the global climate mitigation effort, invest in domestic resilience and take a leadership role in decarbonising the region.

Juxtaposed against a death toll of at least 33 people and an estimated 1 billion animals in last summers bushfires, Morrison’s ‘Australia doesn’t matter’ excuse deserves to be debunked.

First, a simple thought experiment exposes a logical flaw. Imagine that US emissions — at 14 per cent of the global total — were evenly distributed across all 50 US states, and each became an independent country. Each would account for just 0.28 per cent of global emissions. Morrison’s argument essentially says that parts of the whole are too small to matter. But dividing up responsibility does not shrink the total emissions.

Second, Australians emit 3.37 times more CO2 per capita than the global average citizen, a number that jumps to 4.15 when including more potent greenhouse gasses such as methane. As the world’s largest exporter of coal and second largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, Australia’s fossil fuel exports introduce a further 565.72 megatonnes (Mt) of CO2 into the global supply chain. And in burning an area equivalent to the size of Iceland, the recent fires released an additional 400 Mt of CO2 — an amount roughly equivalent to Australia’s yearly carbon output.

But the key point that Australia’s leaders and citizens are yet to grasp is that the location of emissions is separate to the impacts of climate change, and the outcomes are going to be bad for Australia. The geographic distribution of emissions is driven by specialisation, trade relationships and comparative advantages. Some countries produce carbon-intensive heavy manufacturing goods, others produce lower-carbon services.

But the geographic distribution of climate damages — storms, floods and fires — is determined by the global climate system. The globalised nature of the causes and consequences of climate change cannot be undone with acrobatic accounting or an arbitrary and myopic decision for UN treaties to focus solely on national emissions.

Research at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy and the London School of Economics is starting to account for country-level impacts of climate change. A new Wealth Economy Report to be launched 2 March describes a novel accounting method to measure how much individual countries are expected to lose due to global temperature rise.

Building on work by Stanford University climate economists that combines climate models with 50 years of observed environmental–economic data, the new results indicate that Australia is expected to incur between 4 and 8 per cent of all climate damage. With just a third of 1 per cent of the global population, Australia’s per capita economic losses may be 12 to 24 times that of the average global citizen.

The significance of this startling figure is ignored by Mr Morrison’s 1.3 per cent figure. Examining data from the damages perspective shows that Australia has more to gain from global climate action and more to lose from inaction than most. It has a direct and immediate incentive to push for transition to a low carbon future.

Erratic climate policy at home has left Australia with a credibility  problem on the global stage. But a deliberate and sustained effort to decarbonise and build resilience as a response to the fires could make it a leader in the Asia Pacific region. Policy options abound. Canada has a revenue-neutral carbon tax and rebate. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund reinvests natural resource rents for future generations and is divesting from fossil fuels to renewables. Australia could combine these, funding decarbonisation with resource rents and environmental taxes via its own sovereign fund.

With a comparative advantage in research, Australia could take a leadership role in developing and diffusing new technologies for green growth across the region. Southeast Asia’s developing economies now face a stark decision: either lock into outdated fossil fuel-based infrastructure and accept the associated congestion, pollution and health consequences, or invest in a cleaner and safer 21st century low-carbon economy. If Australia phases out fossil fuel exports in favour of human capital exports such as engineering and technology, both sides could gain. Belt and Road Initiative countries may welcome greener infrastructure and technologies, and Australia could gain regional influence and global credibility.

Climate change is a multidimensional challenge that cannot be understood through unidimensional statistics. Focussing on the location of emissions while ignoring consumption patterns and climate impacts creates blind spots. Effective, evidence-led policymaking requires relevant, reliable accounts. Measures of domestic emissions are important but in isolation can be misleading.

Policymakers need a dashboard of climate accounts. It should include domestic emissions, the implicit imports of foreign emissions (the carbon footprint) and most importantly, an account of what each country stands to lose from continued inaction. This final measure of the massive, disproportionate losses Australia will face conveys the urgent incentive for it to invest in adaptation and resilience at home and lobby hard for regional and global decarbonisation.

Matthew Agarwala is an environmental economist and Project Leader for The Wealth Economy at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, the University of Cambridge.

Comments are closed.

Support Quality Analysis

Donate
The East Asia Forum office is based in Australia and EAF acknowledges the First Peoples of this land — in Canberra the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people — and recognises their continuous connection to culture, community and Country.

Article printed from East Asia Forum (https://www.eastasiaforum.org)

Copyright ©2024 East Asia Forum. All rights reserved.