From poverty to power - Oxfam-Québec

5 THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM CLIMATE CHANGEaccrue in a relatively far-off future, and often in different countriesaltogether. The political reality is that floods in New Orleans orCentral Europe are much more likely to prompt action in Washingtonor Brussels than cyclones in Bangladesh or droughts in Niger.New institutions of the kind required by climate change have comeabout in the past as the result of a shock that galvanises allies andconvinces waverers, such as war or depression. Such shocks haveenormous costs, especially for poor people. In this case, waiting for amajor systemic shock will probably entail irreversible tipping points.In that, it resembles nuclear warfare, where global agreements must bereached before a major shock occurs.Convincing the public of the need for short-term sacrifice in theinterest of long-term solutions is always difficult: witness the glacialpace of pension reform in many countries. Achieving all this withequity is even harder – as in the Doha trade talks, where rich countrieshave resisted granting additional flexibility to any poor country thatmight become a competitor. Politicians may hope that a less costlypath comes along in the shape of technological fixes that can obviatethe need for difficult trade-offs. However, technological solutionscould well end up increasing inequality, while the wilder visions ofgeo-engineering – such as sprinkling the oceans with iron filings toencourage algal growth or launching giant reflectors into space – arelikely to have serious unintended consequences.The political obstacles are great, but the scale of the threat is almostunimaginable: climate change could make large parts of the globeuninhabitable, triggering a species loss comparable to the end of thedinosaurs. One of those species might be our own. Perhaps moreplausible is a disintegration of civilisation, catapulting society backcenturies, if not millennia. The global governance of the internationalsystem faces no sterner test in the decades to come.423