The Colombo Climate Summit:

An interview with Dr. Rohan Pethiyagoda

by Ifham Nizam

The challenge before us, as a nation, is to build national resilience to climate change, says internationally recognised Sri Lankan scientist and policy advocate, Dr. Rohan Pethiyagoda, in an interview with The Island. “If the West wants us to reduce emissions, they should damn well be made to pay for it. As for us, we should reduce emissions only if and when this serves our national interest, that is, when it generates sustainable growth for us.”

Excerpts:

Q: Your keynote address at the Colombo Climate Summit held earlier this month raised some eyebrows because you said that bribery and corruption were one of the biggest threats that faces Sri Lanka in its response to climate change. What did you mean by that?

A: We have to recognise the fact that recent Sri Lankan governments have been corrupt on an industrial scale. In the run up to the 2015 election, the Yahapalana Coalition claimed massive corruption on the part of the Mahinda Rajapaksa administration. However, since then, Sri Lanka has sunk four more points towards the bottom of the Corruption Perceptions Index of Transparency International. We are now in the top 35% of the world’s most corrupt countries, our worst score ever. Everything from visas to wind power is being farmed out to cronies by the government without going through a transparent competitive bidding process.

Our national response to climate change, for example, will involve preventing saltwater intrusion into our 103 rivers as sea level rises in the coming decades. It will call for massive civil engineering interventions that will dwarf even the Mahaweli Project. It will cost tens of billions of dollars. This will be a gift to politicians anxious to exploit this opportunity for personal gain. That is why corruption threatens the building of national resilience to climate change. And that is why, unless we get the system change that the youth demanded when they booted Gotabaya Rajapaksa out of office in 2022, we are going to slide from bad to worse.

Q:  There have been allegations on social media that the Climate Summit was all hype and hot air, serving only to greenwash the real issues. For example, it omitted to include many environmental NGOs and even government agencies associated with climate. Your response?

A: The Summit was organised by the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce (CCC) and therefore aimed primarily at business and industry. It did not set out to formulate national policy. And the CCC did a great job, bringing in experts from across the world to lend their expertise. The challenges that climate change poses to business are very different to those that it poses to government. Businesses are concerned mainly with issues of sustainability. That is to say, how they can maximise their profitability while minimising their carbon footprints, maximising their energy efficiency, ensuring agricultural productivity, generating renewable energy, transacting climate-associated financial instruments, and so on.

The challenges before government, however, are very different. Government has to do stuff like building resilience to sea-level change, planning agriculture in a warmer world, investing in energy infrastructure, devising interventions to conserve biodiversity in a changing climate, managing urban water supply, irrigation and hydropower as rainfall regimes change, and so on. In fact, the government would do well to have its own climate summit to plan the National Response to Climate Change.

 As I pointed out in my addresses to the summit, many of the national institutions that need to be at the forefront of our response to climate change are hopelessly underfunded and inefficient. I referred especially to the moribund Department of Meteorology, which badly needs a firecracker lit under it. But agriculture research, too, is lagging badly behind. As far as I know, none of our crop research institutes are developing new cultivars of tea or rice in greenhouse conditions that model future climate regimes. We have to do these things if we are to overcome the massive challenges that a changing climate poses.

Q:President Wickremesinghe has urged that Sri Lanka takes a lead in establishing the world’s first climate university. Isn’t that a step in the right direction?

A: Frankly, I think this is a waste of time and resources. First off, the word ‘university’ derives from the Latin root ‘universitas’, meaning ‘the whole’. In other words, a place that teaches everything. You do not have universities that teach only one subject. That is called a school, a faculty or an institute. It would have been better to invest the enormous sum of money he is trying to raise for this venture in the creation of climate schools in some of our universities. In fact, universities such as Peradeniya already have excellent programmes in the associated sciences. And goodness knows our existing universities are badly underfunded.

 But the president is no fool. He knows that like ‘biodiversity’ in the 1990s, ‘terrorism’ in the 2000s, and ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ in the 2010s, ‘climate’ is the international buzzword of this decade. At a time when Sri Lanka is insolvent and at the sharp end of the UN Human Rights Commission, mooting a climate university paints him and the country in a benign light in the international community. I suspect that this was the consideration driving his rhetoric about a climate university. I would be astonished if such a university ever comes into existence in Sri Lanka. But to be fair, his rhetoric does an excellent job of glossing over our many defects in the eyes of the gullible West.

Q: You raised some eyebrows in the run-up to the Summit when you were quoted as saying “There is no climate emergency”. However, UN Secretary General António Guterres has said that every country should declare a climate emergency. Does this mean that you are a climate change denier, a climate sceptic?

A:  There is no doubt that climate is warming at an apparently unprecedented rate, and that human greenhouse gas emissions are exacerbating this warming. I fully support reducing greenhouse gas emissions globally and building national resilience to climate change. But I do not believe we require a state of emergency to do this. I should explain this.

First off, although Mr Guterres has verbally called on nations to declare emergencies, the UN itself has not declared an emergency. The UN’s procedure provides for it to declare a Level-3 emergency in such situations, but Guterres has not done that. As it happens, not even the UN’s own Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) has advocated for a state of emergency. Meanwhile, even as Mr Guterres sings his hypocritical song, he continues to criss-cross the world in his private jet.

 Second, as Sri Lankans know only too well, a state of emergency is a terrible thing. It suspends normal laws, it gives unlimited power to government, it sets aside human rights and freedoms, and it puts mature, thoughtful planning to one side and engenders ill-conceived knee-jerk reactions by government. We all saw all this play out in Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s disastrous management of the covid emergency, overriding the Health Ministry’s Public and Community Health professionals and turning over management of the pandemic to the army. People were arrested and even abducted for having covid, houses were raided, Muslims were prevented from burying their dead, and billions were spent on procuring covid test kits from cronies without a transparent procurement process. Previous governments used emergencies to incarcerate, torture and murder thousands of youths. We should have learned by now that emergencies are not things you can trust Sri Lankan politicians with.

Finally, you need to recognise that our response to climate change is going to take decades: certainly, beyond the end of this century. Do people seriously intend to have a state of emergency for the next 70 or 100 years? Only a very ignorant person would say so.

Q: But don’t we have a responsibility to be good global citizens? Should we not do everything we can to reduce emissions?

A:  Look, for the past two centuries, the West industrialised at the cost of the global environment. The 50% increase we have seen in atmospheric carbon dioxide over that period is almost in its entirety caused by the West. They enriched themselves at the cost of the global environment with the one hand while suppressing us through colonialism with the other. And now they have the cheek to tell us, the developing world, that it is our job to be good global citizens? Look at it this way. Say that a cake was made for the whole world to share. Then, the West elbows its way to the table, gobbles up 90% of it and fattens itself. Having done that, it tells us “Now there’s only 10% left. Please be good global citizens and share this 10% equitably among yourselves and with us.” My answer is No. The developing world should simply tell the developed world to fly a kite. They caused this mess, and they should pay to clean it up, not us.

The challenge before us, as a nation, is to build national resilience to climate change. If the West wants us to reduce emissions, they should damn well be made to pay for it. As for us, we should reduce emissions only if and when this serves our national interest, that is, when it generates sustainable growth for us. But then, even when wind power, for example, has become dirt cheap worldwide, we are paying three times the world price for it here in Sri Lanka because corrupt people are lining their pockets with loot.

In my view, Sri Lanka should even consider withdrawing from the UN’s COP (Conference of Parties) process. Now we are at the 29th COP, which if nothing else, shows that the first 28 COPs were failures. They have done nothing to attenuate climate change. These COP meetings involve thousands of officials flying to global tourism hotspots every year, cramming into five-star hotels and returning home with papers full of promises and platitudes. None of that ever gets turned into so-called climate action. It is a waste of time, and we should have the courage to say so and refuse to dance to the West’s tune. Of course, they will try to cut so-called aid to us. But if we state our case clearly to the citizens of the West, showing that their governments’ demands that we mitigate climate change are just an extension of the colonial enterprise, I think we will win the day. We need to call out the West’s hypocrisy.

Q: That’s a strong word. Can you seriously make such a claim?

A: What, hypocrisy? Of course, I can. Just take the UK. Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions are now 50% lower than they were in 1990. The UK is the poster child of the developed world. Three cheers! But how did they do it? First, they exported a lot of their emissions by turning from a high-carbon manufacturing economy into a low-carbon service economy. Goods for the UK market are now increasingly manufactured overseas, so the exporting countries’, principally China, are doing the emitting on the UK’s behalf. The UK has also been replacing high-CO2 coal as a source of energy with ‘renewable’ wood-pellets imported from North America. Millions of tons of wood pellets. Its argument is that this is sustainable because the CO2 that wood combustion emits will be reabsorbed when those American forests are replanted. But they claim the emissions reduction now, even though the trees will not grow back for decades from now. Such examples, to my mind, are indicative of the lowest form of hypocrisy and we should call them out on it. But the UK may not be the worst offender: Germany is not far behind. So yes, I am serious when I call these countries hypocrites. Sadly, most of their citizens are unaware of the true facts, and I don’t blame them. They too, are misled by their governments.

Q:     You make everything sound pretty hopeless…

A: Ah, but I am optimistic. I think governments like the UK’s and Germany’s have been stampeded by activists into making promises that they simply cannot keep. But globally, humans have been wonderful innovators. Our hallmark as a species is innovating. I have no doubt that we will innovate our way out of global warming too. This is a long journey, and we are only at the beginning. If we keep our nerve and stay the course like responsible adults should, we’re going to come out of this just fine. But by then there will be new problems that call for yet more innovations. That’s the human predicament, the human story.

Q:     Are there examples of innovations in Sri Lanka that help address climate threats?

A: There are many. Colombo Port City is a fine example of the kind of engineering we need to reclaim land that lies below sea level. Industry has been becoming more sustainable, too. Star Garments’ 35,000-square foot facility in Katunayake is South Asia’s first certified ‘Passive House’ factory: It uses 70% less energy than other buildings of comparable size. And if you think about it, the thousands of tanks and reservoirs scattered across the dry zone were built by Sri Lankan kings over the past 2000 years as a response to a climate threat, namely drought. What a phenomenal innovation that ‘hydraulic civilization’ was!

And then there are the ongoing efforts to reconnect fragmented wet-zone forest fragments by means of biodiversity corridors. Initiatives by NGOs such as the PLANT project of the Wildlife and Nature Protection Society, the rainforest and mangrove restoration projects of Biodiversity Sri Lanka, and the 2-km forest corridor at Endana near Kahawatta by Dilmah Conservation are leading the way in this regard. I urge your readers to support these pioneering projects. That is how, by everyone doing their bit, Sri Lanka can build resilience to the climate of the future.