The Asia-Pacific in the eye of superstorms

The world recently witnessed with horror the devastation superstorm Haiyan wreaked on the Philippines. But as Tarique Niazi reminds us, the Philippines is not the only Asian nation which has become ground zero for climate change.

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SUPERSTORM Haiyan made a devastating landfall in the east-central Philippines on 8 November, leaving behind a trail of death and destruction that has draped the whole country in a pall of grief. The Philippines has since been reeling from this disaster.

The typhoon buffeted the most vulnerable of Filipinos, 40% of whom live below the poverty line (i.e., $1.25 a day). Many of them fished for a living. Their means of livelihood compelled them to live dangerously close to the shoreline of the western Pacific. The highest ground on which some of them found their perch was just 1 metre above sea level. When the storm swelled, with waves as high as 6 metres, its poor victims were defenceless. The crashing walls of  water swept away all that they possessed.

The cumulative losses in lives and livelihoods, homes and hearths, businesses and infrastructure have no parallel in Philippine history, just as Haiyan has no precedent in the annals of meteorology. As of now, 13 million Filipinos, of whom 5 million are children, have been scarred by the destructive fury of Haiyan, while 600,000 have been rendered homeless. The number of deaths may climb past10,000.

The staggering scale of humanitarian crisis that followed Haiyan's landfall was well beyond the capacity to respond of the underresourced and overstretched Philippine government. Oxfam found it overwhelming even for the global humanitarian assistance system. The largest brunt of recovery efforts, however, fell on the Philippines itself, which Haiyan had already bled of precious resources. As of 16 November, its economic losses alone were valued at a whopping $15 billion, or 5% of the Philippines's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of around $300 billion. In the face of a slowdown in global and regional economies, it will take the country many years of hard work before it recovers its bearing.

Future forecasts are even more sobering for average Filipinos and their leaders. As a nation of 7,100 islands, the Philippines sits on the frontline of global climate change. This tragically means that Typhoon Haiyan is not the last of nature's bites that Filipinos will have to endure. As climate change begins to impose dire costs, more such disasters loom ever larger on the horizon. The Philippines has already borne the brunt of worsening climate change in economic losses of $1.6 billion a year from increasingly frequent and intense typhoons.

Ground zero of climate change

The Philippines is among the Asian nations that seem to have become ground zero for climate change. Many coastal and island nations in Asia are already among its fellow sufferers. In the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh has become the most exposed country to worsening climatic events. Year after year, it is battered by cyclones of ever higher intensity and ever greater frequency. In a single event of extreme weather, hundreds, and sometimes thousands, lose their lives. Economic and social dislocation is visited upon millions, leaving them stranded for months and even years. If global mean warming exceeds 1.5 degrees Celsius, the largest chunk of coastal Bangladesh will begin to teem with 'climate refugees'. By Bangladesh's own reckoning, 20 million of its citizens may face climate migration over the next 40 years, for whom it proposes their 'managed migration' to Western countries. Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lends his voice to Dhaka's call. He asks Western governments to give 'managed migration' serious consideration.

Even worse, the island nation of the Maldives, which is barely 1.5 metres above sea level, will vanish from the face of the earth in the next 50 years as the global average temperature continues to rise. A nation of 1,200 islands, the Maldives has already seen 30 of its islands swept away in the tsunami in 2004.

Five years after, in 2009, Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed struck the world with a blunt call for ending fossil fuel consumption to save his country of 328,000 people: 'If the world can't save the Maldives today, it might be too late to save London, New York or Hong Kong tomorrow.' He pledged to make his nation carbon-neutral, running it on 100% renewable energy. Anticipating challenges that could forestall the passage to a carbon-free Maldives, he reasoned: 'Going green might cost a lot but refusing to act now will cost us the Earth.'

Nasheed was deposed in a coup in 2012. He again lost a presidential bid in November 2013 as beneficiaries of the status quo managed to keep him out of power. Nobody knows 'who' won the Maldives election, but everybody knows who lost it and why. Nasheed nonetheless retains his role as a climate crusader whom many revere. The Hollywood director Jon Shenk honoured his work for climate justice in a memorable documentary, The Island President.

Like the Maldives, Sri Lanka also is precariously perched in the heart of the Indian Ocean, which makes it no less vulnerable. Known for its stunning scenic beauty, this island nation has long been convulsed in a self-destructive war. It has just staunched its bleeding, but it still has a long way to go to bind up the deep wounds. At the same time, Sri Lanka has many bright spots. It leads South Asia in economic development (measured in per capita income), social progress (measured in adult literacy), gender equity and climate-readiness. It is a Kerala - the beauty spot of South Asian social democracy - on the national scale! Yet climate-induced disruptions stare at it as the greatest threat to its survival over the next half-century. 'Its agriculture, fisheries, and tourism are particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels and weather-related disasters,' reports the Guardian.

Likewise, the coastal communities of India and Pakistan - in that order - run the same risk of being deluged as sea levels rise. In 2010, Pakistan experienced a different kind of climatic event - a once-in-100-years flood that forced 20 million of its residents from their homes and cost the country $20 billion (one-tenth of Pakistan's GDP of $200 billion in 2010) in economic losses.

Climate change stalks the African continent

The fragility of the African continent is even more sobering. Drought, desertification, livestock fatalities, infectious diseases, food shortages and water scarcities already stalk the length and breadth of the region. Climate change is sharpening the lethality of these murderous challenges, and exacerbating the conditions of environmental decline in general. The giant nations of Africa, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, Nigeria, Somalia and Sudan, are already in the throes of ecological depletion. Their political conflicts are deeply anchored in their fragile ecologies.

However, African sufferings may go unnoticed, as they are less likely to suffer visually spectacular disasters on the scale of Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy or Typhoon Haiyan. Climate-induced disasters may yet trigger epidemics, large-scale human fatalities or mass migration that would thrust the continent onto the world's retina. It will likely occur because of sudden overheating of the continent. It must be remembered that Africa is already the warmest continent on the planet. Libya is the continent's thermal powerhouse, whose citizens are known to have endured the world's peak temperature. Just as a water temperature rise of a few degrees in the Atlantic or the Pacific can spell disaster, so can a few degrees' increase in atmospheric temperature. For all these reasons, Africa is as much in the eye of superstorms as are Asian nations. Africa stands threatened by the warming of the atmosphere that can set off a trajectory of destructive events. It is particularly fraught with climatic threats of epidemics, human fatalities or mass migration, compounded by political conflicts that sear the entire continent.

The science of typhoons

A section of meteorologists are still dismissive of causal links between climate change and the production of cyclones, typhoons, hurricanes or superstorms like Haiyan. Such dismissals, however, only feed into climate scepticism. The science of typhoons and climate change is quite clear. When the IPCC released its fifth assessment report on 27 September, it confirmed warming of the atmosphere and overheating of the oceans - the latter is responsible for the production of cyclones. When sea surface temperature hits 26 degrees Celsius, a cyclone is formed. When oceans are a few degrees warmer than normal, superstorms begin to brew. Superstorm Sandy burst out of the Atlantic coastal water that was about 3 degrees Celsius warmer than normal. Similarly, the surface temperature of the western Pacific was 1-5 degrees Celsius warmer in 2013 than its average range in 1980-2000. Warmer oceans evaporate faster to power the storm, and warmer atmosphere holds more moisture to cause rainstorms.

The atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who also serves on the IPCC, sees clear connections between the warming of the oceans and the production of high-velocity winds and storm surges as witnessed in Haiyan. He went so far as to suggest that developing nations such as the Philippines are suffering for the sins of developed countries that followed the path of carbon-heavy development. He stopped short, however, of suggesting compensation for climate mitigation to developing nations.

Financing climate adaptation

But financing of climate adaptation has been an important part of United Nations climate change talks since the Copenhagen conference in 2009. Haiyan's landfall only added to the urgency of this need, the typhoon happening to time its landing with climate talks in Warsaw, Poland, in November. These talks are held each year in the run-up to crafting a climate treaty in 2015. One important outcome of the Copenhagen conference was the financial commitments by developed nations to help less affluent nations in adapting to climate-induced disruptions. Initially, developed countries committed $30 billion for 2010-12, and pledged to increase this commitment to $100 billion a year by 2020. Oxfam, however, deflated such hopes in an analysis which showed that developed nations had begun to wriggle out of even a modest commitment of $30 billion spread over multiple years. It further dampened any prospect for redeeming the grand pledge of $100 billion a year in climate finance by 2020.

Disaster capitalism

These public commitments are likely to be relegated to transnational financial capital. Some saw the first sign of it in choosing Poland, which stands out for its pro-business, climate-sceptic, coal-fired development trajectory, as the site of the 2013 UN climate talks. No wonder that, at the talks in Warsaw, discussions were focused on 'mobilising private finance such as loans and equity investments'.

Private finance hotly pursues profits even in the midst of people's sufferings. It is no coincidence that risk management companies that specialise in 'catastrophe modelling' are proliferating. The chief research officer of one such company gloomily noted meagre financial prospects in rebuilding the Philippines: 'The economic activity of reconstruction itself is much lower [in the Philippines] than it would be in a rich country where everybody's using insurance and claims assessors and getting quotes from builders. A lot of people [in the Philippines] will end up mending their own houses.' Naomi Klein famously described this profit-driven approach to human tragedies as 'disaster capitalism'.

'End this madness!'

The IPCC in its fifth assessment report concluded with 95% certainty that humans are at the root of climate change. This conclusion seems an official inauguration of Anthropocene, the age of human extravagance, in which humans have evolved (or, more appropriately, devolved) into a geological force on the scale of volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis in altering the atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere. In the process, this hubris has hung a huge question mark over the very survival of the human race on this planet.

Yet all humans are not equally destructive; nor are they equally vulnerable. Many, as in the Philippines, are victims of the actions of the few who are driving climate change and planning to profit from it at the same time. Sitting atop among the latter are the fossil fuel industry and its beneficiaries, who are accumulating $1.9 trillion a year in subsidies in addition to immense profits. Climate change is the sin of their profiteering, for which the global poor are atoning with their lives.

As the Philippine delegate to the Warsaw climate talks tearfully pleaded, this madness must end. It doesn't make sense to sacrifice the primary Earth economy for the illusory secondary human economy that is measured in the piles of worthless paper money built by 'quantitative easing' (printing money).

Tarique Niazi, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in the US. This article is reproduced from The Asia-Pacific Journal (Vol. 11, Issue 48, No. 5, 2 December 2013, japanfocus.org).

*Third World Resurgence No. 279/280, November/December 2013, pp 37-39