ISLAMABAD, Jan 25 (APP):Executive Director of the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative (C2G), Janos Pasztor has suggested that amid rising global temperatures and whooping impacts of climate change Pakistan needed to focus solar radiation modification (SRM) measures for reducing global warming impacts driving natural hazards and catastrophes.
The C2G Executive Director, in an exclusive chat with APP on managing the risks from an increasingly likely overshoot of global temperature beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius, said that the world was getting hotter and to exceed 1.5 degrees in the future. There was a need to work out solutions to it, he added.
Pastzor said, “Governance is the key” to achieving this ambition which was much broader than the traditional concept of it. “It takes new techniques, diverse people and groups coming together to learn, discuss and inform decisions,” he underlined.
The sustainable development expert believed that the stakeholders needed not to work for carbon dioxide reduction (CDR) which was mostly on the agenda of most of the governments highlighting net zero ambitions.
He informed that the SRM included three major techniques, including surface albedo modification, marine cloud brightening and stratospheric aerosol injection.
The surface albedo calls to divert more sunlight back to it for reducing emissions, and Switzerland was practising it to reduce glacial melting Pakistan has the opportunity to use it for averting the recurring phenomenon of glacial lake outburst floods causing massive life and property damages, Pastzor said.
The marine cloud brightening was being performed in Australia to protect green coral reefs which should be done at the regional level to manage the rising sea temperatures causing coral bleaches even in Pakistan. However, the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) made it very clear that this technique could be supplemented but not the only solution to existing efforts and not an alternative to climate change or global warming mitigation measures, he added.
The senior UN diplomat claimed that it could be a supplement with few risks, but the governance issue needed to be resolved to ensure a smart transformation of efforts to ensure a decline in temperature. The earth’s temperature rise was spiking up but there was no comprehensive governance for this new technology, he said, “Business community has an opportunity to intervene to earn through successful partnerships.”
Commenting on unilateral actions by various states, he said it would have tremendous impacts on the environment but would give rise to geopolitical tensions. “IPCC has been looking on the science behind SRM or solar engineering. The climate crisis is really challenging and we might be requiring this technology to cope with the outcomes unknown. We want to make governments and countries think on this issue and take it to the agenda of UN.”
The C2G had identified 40 countries from G20 and other vulnerable states due to climate change and was engaging at the capital level to associate and encourage this kind of conversation as there was no country with a clear strategy to move forward on it, Pastzor said.
He suggested that there was a movement to make this thing understandable but still it required more discussion, whereas the way to address it could be through a governance model that connected countries working on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs).
Pakistan, he said had done enormous amount of work on Loss and Damage at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 27th meeting of the conference of the parties (COP-27) in Egypt. “What are the good ways to build on that?
There will be more loss and damage in future. How to look at those countries doing SRM? What countries Pakistan have ‘like-minded’ where it is seeking support?,” the global expert queried while introspecting Pakistan’s efforts at the global foras for garnering support for developing countries facing massive impacts of climate change.
He added that was a need to have a stakeholder engagement on SRM and there should be scientists working on it.
Replying to a query, he said the SRM was never produced and implemented but a concept already in the market adopted in bits and pieces. The aerosols of sulphur from the volcano kept earth’s temperature half a degree lower for two years and in many countries the local pollution was being cleansed and it was happening but no experiment done earlier.
He said that there were a lot of studies on the risks and benefits of stratosphere aerosol injection on human health, agriculture etc., however, in the current state of knowledge no one could deny it as there were many unknown risks to it.
“We don’t have enough information on this. One has to compare the risk of doing with that of not doing. There are risks necessary to be known as a unilateral declaration could be looked at as an act of war. There are countries benefiting from snow melt in the Arctic and those getting impacted on the other side.”
Janos Pastzor informed that modifying climate meant over the decades transformation, whereas marine cloud brightening was actually closer to weather modification and if it ever worked it would also have local and regional impacts.
