July 16, 2007 -- The Economist (Subscription)
Poor countries may be more worried than rich ones
The biggest problem in the fight against climate change is the issue of how to involve poor countries. Developing-country governments are reluctant to bear the costs of averting climate change. Two reasons are generally given: first, that rich countries are largely responsible for global warming, and second, that people in developing countries have more immediate problems to worry about.
The first point is indisputable. Industrialisation in the rich world started long before that in the poor world; carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for around 200 years, so developed countries have contributed far more of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than developing ones have.
The second point sounds likely also to be correct. People in developing countries have immediate personal needs—such as health, education, clean water, decent food—which are largely satisfied in developed countries. Surely they would want governments to invest in those areas, rather than in averting the distant risk of climate change?
But if a report by HSBC published on July 12th is right, that assumption seems to be wrong. HSBC asked people in both rich and poor countries not just about their level of concern about climate change, but also what should be done about it and whether the world was likely to avert it.
The highest levels of concern were not in the developed countries, but in the developing ones. Only 22% of Britons thought climate change was one of the biggest issues the world faces, whereas 60% of Indians and 47% of Chinese did. And the countries with the largest proportions of people ranking climate change as the world’s most worrying issue were Mexico, Brazil and China.
Attitudes in Europe in particular were marked by pessimism. In Britain, 5% of respondents thought people and organisations (and according to most, that means governments) were doing what was needed to combat climate change. The figures were similar in France and Germany. In China, an extraordinary 41% did—which may say more about the Chinese people’s faith in government than about effective action against climate change.
Some 41% of Germans thought it was not even worth trying to do anything about climate change, mostly on the grounds that nothing can be done. Such fatalism was far less prevalent in poorer countries. Almost nobody in Mexico and Brazil took that view. Confidence that climate change can be stopped was much higher in developing countries than in developed ones.
Perhaps it is not surprising that people in the developing world are worried. Rich countries are in the temperate parts of the globe; it is the world’s hotter, drier nations that will feel the effect of climate change first. Indeed, they may already be affected: rainfall patterns are going awry in China, and the earlier melting of Himalayan snow is damaging agricultural productivity in bits of the Indian subcontinent. Concern about climate change may also be bound up with broader environmental worries, which are mounting in China in particular.
Still, these findings certainly overturn previous assumptions about attitudes around the world. Does that matter? For those who think that governments should be taking stronger measures to avert climate change, it probably does. The interesting implications are not so much for Europe and America. People in those regions don’t think climate change is the most important problem in the world; but nor are their governments behaving as though it is.
What these data change is the debate about involving poorer countries. When developing-country governments resist pressure from Europe and America for action, they can still use the argument that climate change is mostly the rich world’s fault. But the argument that their people have other priorities for government action looks harder to sustain. Whether they choose to listen to their people’s concerns is, of course, another matter.
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