- Linnean Medal and Rolex Award for Enterprise winner, scientist and conservationist Rohan Pethiyagoda on Sri Lanka’s imperatives to respond to climate change
Climate change is certainly a hot topic these days, with science painting a scary picture. In order to avoid the worst impacts of global warming, science demands that the entire world achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
As a small island, Sri Lanka is highly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change. As 50% of the county’s 22 million citizens live in low-lying coastal areas, most are at major risk of the future increase in the sea level. Sri Lanka loses an average of United States Dollars ($) 313 million each year due to climate related disasters. The numbers are alarming, but, does Sri Lanka really need to be alarmed?
On ‘Kaleidoscope’ last week, scientist, conservationist, Linnean Medal winner and Rolex Award for Enterprise winner Rohan Pethiyagoda discussed the rhetoric on climate emergency quite candidly.
Following are excerpts from the interview:
Sri Lanka is among the top 10 countries impacted by extreme weather. Does this ranking actually hold any water?
No, because we simply don’t have the data. There aren’t even good models that predict substantially the different weather patterns during the next two decades from what we have seen in the past. Most like to make this an urgent and immediate issue for this country. It is an issue of course for all humanity, including Sri Lanka, but, there is no need for a panic response.
There are two schools of thought: Sri Lanka is in a climate emergency or that Sri Lanka is not really impacted as much as others in the region. What would your observation be?
We have to be careful when using the word ‘emergency’. The Secretary General of the United Nations (UN) has been telling Governments that they should declare emergencies. I think that this is fundamentally wrong for several reasons – if there was an emergency, the Secretary General would give up using these private jets and he hasn’t. Also, the UN has an explicit provision in its Charter to declare a Level 3 emergency and they have not done so. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is the world’s supreme body working within the orbit of the UN, has not recommended declaring an emergency. We also have to think about what happens when an emergency is declared: a good example is Covid, when an emergency was completely abused by politicians for their own gain. We have never seen human rights violations as we have seen during emergencies in Sri Lanka. Knee-jerk reactions from the Government, sidelining institutions like the Ministry of Health and giving the management of Covid to the Army makes absolutely no sense. The whole procurement process for Covid-related pharmaceuticals was hijacked and given to crooks. In previous emergencies in Sri Lanka, we’ve seen tens of thousands of young people being slaughtered by the Government in the name of emergency. Most importantly, our response to climate change is going to have to last for the next century. We can’t have an emergency for several decades. We need a more measured, reasoned approach going forward, and not this knee-jerk, crisis management kind of mentality.
So what does climate change portend for Sri Lanka?
According to the worst predictions of the IPCC, there will be an increase in temperatures by the end of this century of up to 3.7 degrees Celsius, so, Colombo will be substantially hotter. We have no idea what will happen in terms of rainfall. Also, the sea levels are predicted to rise by about two feet. We have to build resilience in our coastal communities to take care of that. Because, low lying towns and cities like Matara for example will have flooding events that we have to take care of with civil engineering-based interventions. Water for Colombo is another problem because the Kelani River supplies water to Colombo and the saltwater intrusion into the Kelani River as a result of the increase in the sea level will be very substantial. So, this means building infrastructure to prevent seawater intrusion and preserve fresh water. It will also bring flooding to a lot of land on either side of the River, which means that tens of thousands of people will be displaced. This is an expensive intervention as it has to be done across 103 rivers in Sri Lanka. It is a massively complicated and expensive process to do over the next century.
What should the national response be?
The national response to climate change has to be taken out of politics. We need a climate change institution that will manage policy and the whole framework of climate change resilience and response. The response should certainly be out of the political cycle of five years: we need to think in the 20-year or 30-year time frame. Sri Lanka has done long-term projects before like the Mahaweli Development project, so, there’s no reason why we can’t do it again.
There’s much discussion about achieving net zero emissions and becoming carbon neutral. Firstly, is this practical? Secondly, how do we set about it? Thirdly, what’s the cost?
It’s definitely practical, but, I think that we need to start one step before that. Why should we do it? We should do it because we need to be good global citizens, but, I think that it’s unreasonable for the West to ask us to do this. When we got Independence in 1948, 85% of the carbon emissions on the planet were caused by Europe and the United States, 15% by the rest of the world including China, India, Brazil, Canada, Russia, and everyone else. So, 85% of the cake had been eaten by them already and now there’s 15% less. And what’s the West’s message to us now? ‘We’d like you to share this 15% equitably, not just amongst yourselves, but also with us, please’. I think that that’s a completely unreasonable request. If the West caused the vast majority of the pollution on the planet, it is their responsibility to clean it up, not ours. In my view, countries like Sri Lanka should boycott the Conference of Parties (COP) process for instance and say, ‘We’re not going to come until you show us the money’. Because, all this rhetoric emerging from the West is completely meaningless. Unless they invest in countries like ours, transitioning to net zero means nothing to us. Here are the numbers: if we are to transition just our electricity to zero carbon, it will cost us between $ 40 and 50 billion, which is a massive amount of money. We should spend that money in getting resilience into our economies to face climate change: how do we ensure water security for our cities, in terms of the urban water supply, in terms of irrigation? How do we ensure agricultural sustainability? For that, we have to start investing in science now. So, being a good global citizen is very much at the bottom of my list of priorities. As a national policy, I think that we have to consider our people first. And, if the world is willing to pay us to get to net zero, that’s fine.
How do we make Sri Lanka resilient to climate change?
The big challenge is to invest in research now, at least the demographic research and finding the areas to preserve, in terms of the places that will be affected by the rise in the sea level. We need a lot of planning. Sri Lanka has already been a country that led the way in responding to the climate over the last two millennia, where kings built hundreds of village tanks and reservoirs, and that was a response to drought. We have this intricate network of irrigation systems across the country, which have given us resilience to climate change. This is not a big ask for a country like ours. If we plan it carefully and manage our resources as we head into the climate of the future, I don’t see us having a problem. But, most importantly, I think that much of the hype is unreasonable and built up by the media. For example, the hottest day in the last century means nothing because the hottest day on record was 130 or 140 years ago in 1889 – 36.6 degrees Celcius – hotter than you and I have seen in our lifetime.
I am not a climate change denier and I’m not a sceptic. Climate change is happening. This is real and we have to respond to it. But, there’s no point throwing your arms in the air and getting hysterical. If your response to climate change is throwing soup on classical paintings or pasting yourself to the sidewalk, then I have nothing to say to you because you’re just behaving like a spoiled, ignorant, entitled teenager throwing a tantrum.
Activists like Greta Thunberg have been built up as climate heroes. What’s your take on them?
I think that social media is largely to be blamed for young people in the West who have no other avenues to express themselves. They spend all day looking at their phone and the phone will give you the bad news because the media has no incentive to give you good news because good news doesn’t sell. Bad news will always be what you get to see. And so, young people in the West have got the sense of existential angst that the world is going to end and that this is the last generation. Young people have always had the same fears that have caused them to have this kind of reaction. I don’t take them seriously. Thunberg got away with it because she was 16. No civilised person would attack the ideas of a 16-year-old. But now that she’s an adult, nobody pays attention.
Do you think that our biodiversity is threatened because of climate change?
Yes, but not in the way that most people would think. We had a really warm period of time 120,000 years ago, which is a very short blink of an eye in terms of evolution. Then, the climate was about 4 degrees Celsius warmer than it is now. That’s worse than the IPCC’s prediction for 2100: the sea level was not just two feet high, it was about 24 metres higher than it is now. The aspect that I’m worried about is that as the climate warms, species that are adapted to live in, for example, Colombo, would tend to drift upwards, because it’s cooler as you move up. It gets about 1 degree cooler for every 200 metres that you go up, which is why it often gets about 10 degrees cooler. So the problem is, how do they drift up? We have modified the landscape and reduced our natural forests into little fragments. Those isolated fragments have no connection, geographically, with each other. So, our resilience to climate change will be in part to build connectivity across those habitats. We’ve got a natural opportunity here, because, from very early colonial times, the margins of every river have a reservation, and all rivers flow from the highlands to the sea. We have the opportunity to connect habitats along river sides. Reforesting these areas would be a huge benefit to building biodiversity resilience to climate change, because this way, we build a network of forests across the country and protect our waterways. Almost all the costs for this go into labour, which means that it will uplift those who are most often economically disadvantaged.
If you were given the mantle to tackle climate change for Sri Lanka, what would your three priorities be?
I wouldn’t take it on because I’m 68-years-old and people under 40 should be doing this. So, I won’t take it on but I’ll talk about it. Firstly, planning for the rise in the sea level is urgently necessary, because, many of our towns and most of our population live by the sea, so we have to build resilience there. Secondly, we have to start greenhouse research on agricultural crops – tea, rice, etc. We have to start looking at mimicking climates of the future and inventing cultivars that will be resilient and will flourish in those climates. Thirdly, we need to pay attention to biodiversity, by building connectivity between the highlands and lowlands along rivers. I think that those three are all eminently doable and we should do them fast.
(The writer is the host, director, and co-producer of the weekly digital programme ‘Kaleidoscope with Savithri Rodrigo’ which can be viewed on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. She has over three decades of experience in print, electronic, and social media)