Many goals related to climate change and public health have important deadlines by 2030: reducing carbon emissions, financing poorer countries’ climate mitigation and adaptation plans, protecting biodiversity, anticipating future pandemics, and instituting sustainable development. It does not bode well for any of them that in the second half of this decade — when the world has greater need of science sensitive to societal, developmental, and humanitarian needs plus cross-border trust — Donald Trump will be the U.S. President. Those goals have been instrumentalised by treaties that demand collective action, the ability to negotiate and compromise, and a willingness to assume the long view, all of which Mr. Trump has shown he is incapable of, thus jeopardising the desperate progress the world needs to make. Already, at the recent COP16 summit, the world’s richest countries refused to meet their own commitments to pay for biodiversity management and instead pointed to private-sector funding to bridge the gap. COP29 will begin next week to draft the framework in which the carbon offsets system will operate without devolving into a “pay to pollute” scheme. In his first term, Mr. Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement; refused to fund WHO; censored research findings; promoted the expansion of carbon-intensive industries; and fanned pseudoscience. He also vitiated scientific collaborations by raising the bogeyman of “hidden” political agendas and, after his appointees to the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron doctrine, weakened federal agencies’ ability to regulate emerging technologies.
Given the U.S.’s likely turn towards transactionalism for the next half decade and the world’s rapidly shrinking carbon budget, countries fighting climate change must consider binding agreements so that commitments thereunder survive changes in government, while bracing to miss targets by wider margins in the interim. Then again, Mr. Trump’s U.S. cannot be treated as an isolated stressor. For one, the repercussions for U.S.-Europe trade under Europe’s new Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism are yet to be worked out. Similarly, if the U.S. reduces adaptation financing, which is not unlikely, the drain on other countries’ budgets will compromise their capacity to deal with everything from pathogen surveillance to early-warning systems. There is still hope, however. U.S. States have considerable power to effect subnational action and, while less than ideal, it must not be underestimated. Mr. Trump’s re-election also places a higher premium on other governments’ support — material and otherwise — for their scientists, their collaborators, and evidence-based policymaking to keep the world on course to meeting its goals.
Published - November 08, 2024 12:10 am IST
