{"id":87152,"date":"2022-11-16T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-11-16T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.futuribles.com\/geopolitique-du-climat\/"},"modified":"2024-10-31T12:02:39","modified_gmt":"2024-10-31T11:02:39","slug":"geopolitique-du-climat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.futuribles.com\/en\/geopolitique-du-climat\/","title":{"rendered":"Climate Geopolitics"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The work under review is the third edition of G\u00e9opolitique du climat<\/em> by Fran\u00e7ois Gemenne, a researcher in environmental geopolitics and migration dynamics at the University of Li\u00e8ge and a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The book sheds light on what lies behind \u201cclimate geopolitics\u201d and outlines major recent developments in the field, such as extreme weather events, catastrophic warming prospects and their impacts, and how the international community is dealing with climate change (via international conferences and COP summits).<\/h6>
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Gemenne<\/span> Fran\u00e7ois, G\u00e9opolitique du climat. Les relations internationales dans un monde en surchauffe<\/em>, Paris: Armand Colin (Objectif Monde), November 2021, 3rd<\/sup> edition, 208\u00a0p.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n \n \n <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \"\"\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n

Through the texts, charts, and graphs chosen, Gemenne skillfully elucidates a topic in which physical considerations (the climate itself) and political ones (decisions on reducing greenhouse gases and adaptive strategies) constantly overlap. Due to this extreme interconnectedness, unprecedented for an environmental issue, the climate has in recent years become the matrix for all the classic geopolitical issues: access to resources, interdependence, healthcare, security, justice, sovereignty, and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first two chapters sketch out the geography \u2014 but also the history \u2014 of greenhouse gas emissions (industrialized countries are the biggest polluters both currently and historically, but emerging countries could one day play this role) before then moving on to outline the geography of the impacts of climate change (developing and emerging countries are the main victims). This geographical analysis reveals the first major disparity: that the main offenders are not the main victims of climate change. This disparity is obviously spatial, as the title of the book suggests, but it is also historical and temporal: current polluters will suffer less from the impacts of climate change than future generations, even as the latter will have fewer carbon-based resources available to them. Here we touch on a key point for understanding climate science and policy: climate change is a problem of stock (concentrations of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere) and not just of flow (annual greenhouse gas emissions). Time is therefore of the essence, because we are not starting from scratch: there are past legacies \u2014 positive and negative \u2014 to consider in any policies or measures to be taken on the subject.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The third and fourth chapters, following logically from this observation of disparities, address the questions of migration and security, debunking assumptions that would attribute solely to climate change massive population movements or new international insecurity. One of the specificities of climate change lies in the constant displacement of people, whereas in the past displacement caused by natural disasters was relatively sporadic and temporary. This is another major point to grasp about climate change: there will be no return to normal. Put bluntly, rising water levels and receding coastlines are irreversible. But while climate change and its impacts (or more broadly environmental degradation) may trigger migration processes, they rarely appear to be the sole reason for these movements. Thus, it seems erroneous to speak of \u201cclimate migrants,\u201d despite the links between environmental degradation and migration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The two final chapters focus on solutions, at the institutional, political, technological, and economic levels. Summarizing the history of climate governance (with the founding of the IPCC in 1988 and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992), the fifth chapter focuses primarily on the COP summits, often seen as the arena where everything plays out. The thorough description of these summits puts into perspective their role among various discussion forums and also demonstrates to what extent they have enabled the establishment of a new (if still incipient) climate governance and geopolitics. Indeed, although the decisions made at the COPs are rarely revolutionary, without these spaces to dialogue, understand each other\u2019s interests and risks, and give voice to all (both those responsible and the current victims), any hope of better tackling the climate crisis would be lost. While we are still a long way off, we cannot pretend that no progress has been made in the last thirty years toward achieving better climate stewardship, even though, paradoxically, global emissions have continued to rise during this time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the book\u2019s main insights is that the solutions to be implemented must be part of a new cooperative approach, a systematic collective effort: no one country can be singled out as either the sole \u201csavior\u201d or \u201cculprit.\u201d Thus, any solution must acknowledge the past, the responsibilities of all parties, interdependencies, and a future context that we already know will differ starkly from today (remember that the earth has already warmed by 1.2\u00b0C and, depending on our actions, that warming is likely to rise to between +1.5\u00b0C and +4\u00b0C by 2100).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We must act here (in industrialized countries that are historically responsible, and without delay) and elsewhere (in emerging or developing countries that are the first affected, and will likely see their own responsibility increase in the future); we must act now and in the future, for decades to come, both reducing our carbon emissions and adapting to new circumstances. In sum, a new matrix will have to emerge in response to climate change, encompassing all policies and governing our relationship with other humans and all living things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To effectively address the climate challenge, we will have to learn to work together, in a coordinated way, and not in isolation or by pitting parties against each other. At a time when extreme polarization in political and media debates seems to have become the new norm, it is not an easy message to convey, but it is an essential one for those who understand the stakes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article has been translated from French and edited by Cadenza Academic Translations<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The work under review is the third edition of G\u00e9opolitique du climat by Fran\u00e7ois Gemenne, a researcher in environmental geopolitics and migration dynamics at the University of Li\u00e8ge and a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The book sheds light on what lies behind \u201cclimate geopolitics\u201d and outlines major recent developments … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":77797,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"both","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":301,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[131],"tags":[202,203],"keyword":[1058,896,1015],"class_list":["post-87152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-read-seen-heard","tag-environnement-en","tag-geopolitique-en","keyword-climat-en","keyword-relations-internationales-en","keyword-facteur-temps-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.futuribles.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.futuribles.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.futuribles.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.futuribles.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.futuribles.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87152"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.futuribles.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99202,"href":"https:\/\/www.futuribles.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87152\/revisions\/99202"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.futuribles.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.futuribles.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.futuribles.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.futuribles.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87152"},{"taxonomy":"keyword","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.futuribles.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/keyword?post=87152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}