This summer marked something of a first. In parts of the US and southern Europe, temperatures reached 50°C or more, with NASA describing July as the hottest month on record since comparable records began in the late 1800s. On 16 July, barometers at the aptly named Furnace Creek in Death Valley, California, reached an astonishing 53.3°C. Our planet is warming, and it’s happening faster than we anticipated.
As heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, and flash flooding become commonplace in parts of the world historically unaccustomed to extreme weather, governments and public bodies have been forced to act. One critical measure is the United Nations Kyoto Protocol, a multilateral agreement signed by more than 50 industrialized countries to limit greenhouse gases by allocating a quota system on carbon dioxide emissions. Simply put, each country has a set quota of CO2 emissions – go over and they need to pay, go under and they can sell their carbon credits to others who have exceeded their quotas.
The Kyoto Agreement isn’t without its controversies, but as a mechanism, it has worked relatively well for carbon. The problem is that slowing climate change is more complex than simply taxing the emissions created by burning fossil fuels. The extraction and processing of natural resources – minerals, water, forests, and vegetation that are cleared or used in manufacturing or farming, say – are also driving greenhouse gases, pollution, and an existential loss of biodiversity. And so far, there is no multilateral economic instrument that effectively regulates how fast we are using up the planet’s natural resources – resources that are both rapidly being depleted and finite. A few disparate initiatives are emerging in countries such as Brazil. Initiatives like bio credits or “debt for nature” swaps have been mooted, where financial concessions are exchanged for efforts to protect rainforests. The problem is that these actions are dispersed and decentralized, almost entirely financed with public funds, and without a clear restoration objective.