Saving our common home: reducing risks and impacts of Climate Change

through the Paris Agreement

In the past few decades, we have seen governments collectively working in

addressing the most pressing phenomena of our time, climate change. Over the course
of their diplomacy, leaders from around the world collectively agreed that climate
change is driven by human behavior, that it’s a threat to the environment and all of
humanity, and that global action is needed to stop it (Natural Resources Defense
Council, n.d.). It also created a clear framework for all countries to make emission
reduction commitments and strengthen those actions over time. According to the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the concentration of greenhouse
gases has increased substantially since preindustrial times to levels not seen in at least
800,000 years. Carbon dioxide (the chief contributor to climate change) is up by 40
percent, nitrous oxide by 20 percent, and methane by a whopping 150 percent since
1750; mainly from the burning of dirty fossil fuels. Due to hotter temperatures, the
shifting patterns of our climate exacerbate dangerous and deadly drought, heat waves,
floods, wildfires, and storms. And as it induces extreme weather conditions and
heightens disaster-risk, it also jeopardizes our air, water, and food; spreads disease;
and imperils our homes and safety. We are confronted a growing public health crisis.
Most importantly, the cost of these disasters disproportionately hits the poorest, most
vulnerable, or fragile communities hardest. The UN has also reported that people in low-
and middle-income countries are seven times more likely to be affected (Concern USA,
March 2020). Poverty and constrained access to productive assets mean that rural
livelihoods that depend on agriculture and other natural resources are vulnerable to
even slight variations in weather and seasonality (UNDRR, n.d.).

To counter this urgent and growing threat to humankind, 197 countries, which is

nearly every nation on earth, signed the Paris Agreement. This agreement is a
landmark international accord that was adopted by nearly every nation in 2015 to
address climate change and its negative impacts. The accord aims to substantially
reduce global greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to limit the global temperature
increase in this century to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, while pursuing
the means to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees. The agreement includes commitments
from all major emitting countries to cut their climate pollution and to strengthen those
commitments over time using a framework for transparency, accountability, and the
achievement of more ambitious targets.

RA 9729: Paving the Way for a Framework strategy

As a party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the

Philippines adopted the Climate Change Act of 2009 to do its part in the climate change
response. The law’s ultimate objective is to adopt strategic goals in order to build
national and local resilience to climate change-related disasters through the creation of
a Climate Change Commission. Under this Act, the Commission is in charged to
formulate a framework strategy on climate change to serve as the basis for a program
for climate change planning, research and development, extension, and monitoring of
activities on climate change, among others. Local government units (LGUs) are the
frontline agencies in the formulation, planning and implementation of climate change
action plans in their respective areas. LGUs are obligated to regularly update the
Commission about their respective actions plans to reflect changing social, economic,
and environmental conditions and emerging issues.

Paving the way framework strategy adopted in the Paris Agreement, the
Philippines is one of the pioneering countries who legislated a policy that addresses the
climate crisis. The framework drafted by the Commission will be our nationally
determined contribution or NDC as prescribed in the Paris Agreement. However, to
address the hotter temperatures head on, it should focus on curbing the carbon
emissions of the country. The Agreement necessitates a series of mandatory
measures for the monitoring, verification, and public reporting of progress toward a
country’s emissions-reduction targets. While the system doesn’t include financial
penalties, the requirements are aimed at making the progress of individual nations easy
to track and fostering a sense of global peer pressure, discouraging any dragging of feet
among countries that may consider doing so.

Failure to include the role and impact of multinational companies

Although the scope of the accord only encompasses its consenting signatories, it
failed to include one of the biggest contributors of greenhouse gasses in the planet, the
multinational companies. This is also the same in the Climate Change Act because
there were no mentions nor penalties imposed for multinational companies. In the report
of the Thomson Reuters Foundation (2020), the global supply chains of multinational
companies such as BP, Coca-Cola and Walmart are responsible for nearly a fifth of
climate-changing carbon dioxide emissions. This report is based on the study of
researchers from the University College of London and China’s Tinajin University. Dabo
Guan, the study’s co-author, said that “emissions from the supply chain producing
Coca-Cola products is almost equivalent to what China emits in its food sector to feed
1.3 billion people”. Similarly, foreign affiliates of Walmart emit more than Germany’s
retail sector while Samsung’s emissions around the world are higher than all electronic
manufacturers in India, Thailand and Vietnam, the study found (Lei Win, 2020).

The bigger problem is the businesses outsource many of these emissions are to
poorer parts of the world by investing in production in developing countries. Since 2017,
more than 2,300 suppliers from 50 countries have avoided 230 million metric tons of
emissions through improvements in areas such as energy, waste and packaging, the
spokeswoman told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Scientists warn that failure to
curb the still-growing emissions could lead to crises from food and water shortages to
worsening weather disasters and sea level rise in developing countries.

A Race against Time

Indeed the Paris Agreement is a landmark international treaty that binds the
planet in countering its most pressing threat but this accord is only the first step
because as time went on, countries would return with greater ambition to cut their
emissions, and these cuts could comprise our economic and technological
advancements. According to the Climate Action Tracker, the world’s average
temperature will still rise 2.1°C (3.8°F) by 2100 even if countries fully implement their
pledges for 2030 and beyond. If the more than one hundred countries that have set or
are considering net-zero targets follow through, warming could be limited to 1.8˚C
(3.2°F). To put it simply, we are at a race against time in trying to pause further global
warming. But progress, especially at this length will be slow and I don’t think we can
afford to have the necessary patience of waiting, especially that our collective response
is bluntly overdue.

References:

Concern Worldwide USA. (2020, March 15). What is Disaster Risk Reduction, and Why
Do We Need It?. Retrieved from https://www.concernusa.org/story/what-is-disaster-risk-
reduction/#:~:text=Disaster%20risk%20reduction%20(DRR)%20protects,stand%20to
%20lose%20the%20most.

Denchak, M. (February 19, 2021). Paris Climate Agreement: Everything You Need to
Know. Retrieved from https://www.nrdc.org/stories/paris-climate-agreement-everything-
you-need-know#sec-whatis

Maizland, L. (November 17, 2021). Global Climate Agreements: Successes and

Failures. Retrieved from https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/paris-global-climate-change-
agreements

Lei Win, T. (September 8, 2020). Multinational companies account for nearly a fifth of
global CO2 emissions, researchers say. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-
climatechange-companies-emissions-trf-idUSKBN25Z1W6

United Nations Disaster Risk Reduction. (n.d.). Understanding Disaster Risk: Climate
Change. https://www.preventionweb.net/understanding-disaster-risk/risk-drivers/climate-
change