Region - Outlook for climate policy coordination

Regional cooperation could collapse in the face of climate disasters in the coming years.

Yesterday’s report published by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reviewed the latest climate science and confirmed a lot of bad news. The world is hotter, hurricanes and other major storms are worsening, and sea levels are likely to rise even in the best case scenarios of human action. Small and poor countries including those in Central America and the Caribbean are particularly vulnerable to the effects.

As with previous reports, this one is a call to action. Though some of the negative effects of climate change are locked in, the difference between action and inaction will be significant in terms of lives lost, human suffering and infrastructure damage. The report calls for greater international cooperation to cut greenhouse gas emissions. In spite of everything I write below, I do believe that is possible.

With the publication of the report, I spent some time thinking about the lessons of Covid and how they apply to climate change. One key lesson is quite negative. With Covid, a coordinated hemispheric response would have been ideal. Instead, one of the negative effects of the pandemic was that nearly every country turned inward, shut their borders, competed for vaccines, and engaged in their own responses without coordinating with their neighbors. We’re starting to see greater cooperation now in 2021, but those early months of the pandemic demonstrated that countries will resort to isolationism during real-world crises rather than an idealistic cooperative mechanism.

Frighteningly, the same is likely true if and when regional climate disasters (hurricanes, heatwaves, droughts) hit the Western Hemisphere in the coming decade. We can all wish and recommend that countries coordinate their responses. The OAS and other regional groups can create institutions and working groups to channel efforts. But big crises generate political dynamics that encourage governments to turn inwards and even against their neighbors. “Should” does not equal “will” in all of the planning documents and op-eds.

Covid teaches us that companies operating in the region need to prepare for climate disaster scenarios in which borders close, flights shut down and governments impose restrictions, sometimes justified and sometimes for show, that impede operations and supply chains. I’m not sure which exact disaster scenario leads to those restrictions and isolation measures, but higher impact and cross border disasters, exactly the type that need more cooperation are most likely to drive the reverse.

The other lesson of Covid, already highlighted in many previous reports on climate change but worth mentioning again now that we’ve seen it in the real world, is that the response will play into and even exacerbate economic inequalities both among countries and within them. While disasters will hit people of all economic classes, those with greater means will have access to help and will likely receive preferential treatment from many government policies. This unequal response will then be reflected back in greater political unrest.

None of this is to suggest cooperation and more positive outcomes are impossible. Countries should be working towards cooperating for both reducing greenhouse gas emissions and planning for disaster response and recovery. However, the realistic lesson of Covid is that once the disasters strike, cooperation plans are aspirational and many countries are unlikely to follow through. Preparing for that negative event rather than relying on wishful thinking is necessary.