National Pocket Change Could Climate-Proof East Asia

Another report shows how vastly less expensive it will be to take action against climate change than it will be to throw up our hands and do nothing.

The Asian Development Bank’s latest report, “Economics of Climate Change in East Asia,” shows that for less than 0.3 percent of their combined GDP, China, Japan, Mongolia, and South Korea could protect their most-vulnerable sectors against the current and coming effects of global warming. This is based on spending that amount of money every year between now and 2050.

Failure to do so, the report warns, could put $864 billion in assets at risk. To protect those assets, the four nations together should invest $22.9 billion to climate-proof infrastructure, $4.2 billion to protect their coasts, and $9.5 billion to ensure agriculture is protected. Spend $36.6 billion collectively every year or risk losing over 23 times that.

The non-financial costs of inaction are also outlined in the report. By 2100, it says, what’s now a 1-in-20 year flood is likely to happen every four years. Between now and mid-century, China will lose somewhere around 102 square kilometers of land to rising seas; South Korea will lose 20 percent of its coastal areas. In Japan, by the same time period, one quarter of coastal wetlands (often the critical factor in protecting against typhoons and tsunami) will be gone.

Sea level rise will displace more than one million people in China by 2050, the report also warms, coasting the nation $153 billion. Those displaced in Japan due to rising seas are fewer, with 64,000 estimated climate refugees, coming at an economic cost of $7.8 billion.

Already climate-related disasters since 1970 have created financial losses in China of $259 billion, in Japan $64 billion, in South Korea $15 billion, and in Mongolia $2 billion.

Important to all this is regional cooperation. The costs of climate adaptation and emission reduction go down considerably if nations work together, coordinating efforts. The ADB quantifies this:

In all of the mitigation scenarios examined, the overall coast of reducing emissions can be reduced by 25 percent or more if emission targets are pooled via a regional trading scheme or through adoption of a uniform carbon price. The opportunities for reducing emissions in the PRC are large relative to current and projected emissions, so that a pooling arrangement will involve transfers from Japan and the Republic of Korea to fund reductions in emissions in the PRC. … The benefits from regional cooperation would extend beyond the purely monetary. For the PRC, measures to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases should lead to significant improvements in local air quality, thus reducing the damage to the health of urban populations.

Ultimately, it’s reducing greenhouse gas emissions that is the way to reduce future climate change. The ADB recognizes this when it concludes, “East Asia needs to shift toward a model of economic growth focused on low carbon emissions and more efficient use of resources. The region is moving in this direction…”. This obviously applies to all regions of the world, not just East Asia.

One potential sticking point in cooperation, at least when it comes to coordinating emission reductions: Allocating how much each nation can safely continue to emit, while sticking within the recommendation of the IPCC that global carbon emissions need to be capped at one trillion tons, when we’re collectively over halfway to that cap.

Writing in Yale Environment 360, Fred Pearce examines this thorny issue in some detail. It’s worth a read. The battle lines have already been drawn here, setting up what’s likely to be a hard fight in future climate talks. There are two broad ways forward.

Either we start fresh, ignoring who emitted how much in the past, and allocate the remain emissions equally based on current population, from a baseline of the year 2000. This means the US, for example, would have to cease all carbon emissions by 2025.

Or, as favored by China, future allocations of emissions must include historical emissions, going back to perhaps 1900. This means that the nations of Europe, as well as the United States, used up their shares in the middle of the 20th century, with Japan just going over its share this year. Under such a plan, China and India can keep spewing carbon through roughly mid-century.

Either scenario is a difficult one for the wealthy nations of the world. Given current US politics, that the nation could possibly transition to a zero-carbon economy in just 12 years is nigh impossible. Even with determined political and technological will it would be an ambitious time frame in which to transform infrastructure and behavior. Europe is in better shape in this regard, politically speaking, but such a quick transition is logistically difficult there as well.

Bringing this back to financing climate adaptation and regional cooperation in East Asia, Pearce quotes Chinese geophysicist Ding Zhongli as saying that the only possible solution is for rich nations to pay the likes of China, India, and other emerging economies to forgo emitting what they’d have a right to from a historical perspective. Rich nations in this regional context include both Japan and South Korea.

Putting the ADB figures for climate adaptation in these four nations in some global perspective, what the United States spends every 18 days on its military would be enough to climate-proof China, Japan, Mongolia, and South Korea. Less than 0.2 percent of US GDP would also do it. If the US and European Union came together, it would be less than one-tenth of one percent of their combined GDP.

In other words, climate-proofing East Asia, as well as adapting to climate change across the world, involves spending fractions of percent of total economic activity—to prevent potential civilizational collapse. None of this is about the money of doing so, political pundits pontificating aside. It’s about recognizing and responding to an existential threat. It’s about acting.