Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Podesta, John
• Stern, Todd

Titel

A Foreign Policy for the Climate

Ist Teil von

• Foreign affairs (New York, N.Y.), 2020-05, Vol.99 (3), p.39-46

Ort / Verlag

New York: Council on Foreign Relations NY

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

PAIS Index

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In September 2019, after a two-year drought and some of the hottest days on record, wildfires broke out across eastern Australia. The fires raged for seven months and consumed 75,000 square miles. They displaced tens of thousands of people and destroyed almost 3,000 homes. In Melbourne, the air quality was 30 percent worse than in famously toxic New Delhi. Researchers estimate that more than one billion animals died in the conflagration. And the total economic damage is expected to exceed the previous $4.4 billion record set by the Black Saturday fires in 2009.The Australian fires were a particularly harsh reminder of the effects of climate change, but they were hardly the only one to make the headlines recently. Between 2010 and 2019, natural disasters cost the world approximately $2.98 trillion, making the last decade the costliest one on record. And in the first half of 2019, extreme weather displaced seven million people, setting a new midyear high. The situation will only get worse: in the next few decades, climate change threatens to cause shortages of food and water, render coastlines that are home to hundreds of millions of people unsuitable for habitation, and unleash a stream of refugees that will dwarf the flow during the recent European migration crisis.Tackling the climate emergency will require decisive action. The United States, in particular, will require both a full mobilization at home and an unhesitating commitment to leadership abroad. A president ready to take on climate change must organize the government to meet this challenge and work with Congress to enact a broad program of investments and incentives for the development and dissemination of clean technology. Abroad, the United States must devise a climate-centered foreign policy that uses the country's political capital and economic resources to drive the decarbonization of the global economy. Several changes are needed, starting at the White House and extending to key bilateral relationships, international forums, and financial institutions-to accelerate a global clean energy transformation and galvanize the political will necessary to confront climate change. The tools to spur clean technological innovation, promote sustainable investment and job creation, and confront environmental injustices are within political leaders' grasp. Heads of state and government need only be willing to employ them.