Just what will the new year hold for changing climate?
Published in The Scotsman, Sunday, 4 January 2009
ACCORDING to a wise saying: "If you want to know what the future holds, look at the present." Last year's developments will become the foundations for this year's action.
In 2008, the world's most pressing issue moved up a few notches on the political and media agenda, but then lost visibility as the financial meltdown took hold. It's ironic on one level, this, as the cost of climate inaction would cast us into a far deeper economic abyss than today's recession.
The scientific rationale for action strengthened with new evidence about the rapidly melting Arctic ice and the vital role of forests in the global ecosystem.
Science will teach us more this year, too. This spring we will learn, in superior detail, what climate change will mean for the UK in years to come. We will be shown, at high resolution, the patterns of temperature and precipitation that our grandchildren will experience across Scotland. This is courtesy of the UK Climate Impacts Programme. Climate policies lag behind the scientific evidence, and seem to evolve over grindingly slow geological timescales.
However, late 2008 saw a seismic shift occur with the passing of Scotland's Climate Bill and the UK's Climate Act. Although they have similar long-term objectives, to deliver 80 per cent carbon reductions by 2050, they do differ in the devilish detail. In particular, they allow flexibility in exactly what interim targets are needed by when. Furthermore, both documents cop out of a final decision on crunch issues - aviation and shipping.
Of course, as Stewart Stevenson, Scotland's minister for climate change, himself admits, setting targets in itself is not sufficient. Delivery is what counts.
By the middle of this year we will be presented with the Scottish and UK interim carbon reduction targets under these laws: and an indication of how we will get there. Worryingly, analysis by DLA Piper, published in this newspaper, questions whether Holyrood will have the teeth to deliver on the targets. In particular, it concludes that as energy policy is not a devolved issue, the real decisions will be made in Westminster.
Is this the time for Holyrood to negotiate more energy autonomy for Scotland?
With some of the best natural wind and marine resources in Europe, we could become a green powerhouse.
This cannot come soon enough. More than two-thirds of UK electricity generation capacity will be obsolete by 2030.
A separate European target requires a tenfold increase in renewable energy by 2020. Meanwhile, Britain's dependence on natural gas is growing, perilously limiting options to unstable regimes.
There are signs that our politicians are concerned, yet impotent and frustrated by climate change.
In December, Ed Miliband urged people to take to the streets to bring about action. By extraordinary coincidence (surely), the next day a group of protesters from Plane Stupid chained themselves to the runway at Stansted Airport, saying they were "more scared of climate change than jail". If this is anything to go by, we can expect more public mobilisation on climate change over the coming year.
However, our businesses, although becoming more eco-savvy and saving energy, are now cutting back on non-essential green research and development spending. Pre-recession pledges, such as Tesco's announcement to carbon-label all its products, may suffer.
Climate change deniers are still an obstacle to progress, though thankfully their voice is fading behind its rhetoric.
Taken as a whole, progress on climate change is fragile, easily derailed and patchy. In our collective consciousness, we still haven't quite twigged fully.
We are yet to face the fact that a transformation to a low-carbon economy is already upon us.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon has called 2009 "the year of climate change", and said: "Success will require extraordinary leadership".
Let's hope that this becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, and 2009 is the year when we roll our sleeves up and get on with it.