Pacific to look to China for climate leadership Featured
High tide at Nukutoa island, Takuu Atoll, Papua New Guinea.
23 July, 2017. An Australian think tank says the withdrawal of the US Trump administration from the Paris Accord presents an opportunity for the Pacific to look to China.
The director of research at The Australian Institute, Rod Campbell said China is getting more serious about climate change.
Mr Campbell said he lived in China for a few years and the air quality and use of coal for power and heating is a big deal but there is a push for China to clean up its act.
He said as well as signing up to the Paris Accord, there is this political push in domestic China for fossil fuel reduction and coal mining moratorium and the eyeing up jobs in the green economy.
"I think China is obviously pretty central to any international agreement as they are the biggest greenhouse gas emitter and the biggest coal user. So China is very important to any international climate change negotiation."
He said what is perhaps most interesting about China and the next round of negotiations is that China has already implemented a policy around no more new coal mines.
Meanwhile Fiji is the first small island state to preside over the conference of parties (COP23), the annual round of the ongoing UN climate negotiations later this year.
A policy analyst and consultant for the Fiji government, Joseph Veramu, said its Prime Minister is on a mission to get developed nations to reduce emissions and China seems committed to do more to support.
-RNZI
2 comments
-
What does it really mean for the Pacific looking to China now that the US has removed themselves from lending their support towards fixing climate change in the broader context of the current environmental crisis? Does it mean financial, scientific, political, social, moral or ethical and all?
The slogan, viz., "Think globally, Act locally" or for that reason "Act globally, Think locally" applies to climate change generally as it does to development (and governance) specifically.
There is then a dire need to combine both theory and practice in both development and climate change, on all the local, regional and global levels, with theory taking the lead over practice, in that order of precedence.
This must lead us to revise the above-named slogan, focusing on its totality rather than its partiality as follows: "Think and act globally, Think and act locally," where knowledge and skills are combined, with knowledge preceding skills, in that logical order.
From both an academic and practitioner's view, there has been a consistent call to "take culture seriously," when it comes to development, in view of its being laregely neglected in both the theory and practice of development, as is the case of climate change.
The question then arises, where does culture situate itself in climate change or more fully where do local knowledge (and skills) composed in culture and communicated in language, let alone both theory and practice, locate themselves in climate change, not to mention development? -
Fair Enough as they are populated the pacific islands.