This essay won an Honorable Mention in the 2023 YRIS High School Essay Contest for its response to the following prompt: “What is a current issue in international relations or world affairs that does not receive enough attention in global media?”

Electronic waste, or e-waste, has arisen as a critical global concern in today’s digitally-driven society, posing substantial environmental and health dangers. However, amidst this worldwide challenge, the Philippines stands out as a country disproportionately plagued by the e-waste problem. Wherever one goes, streets are ridden with broken appliances and discarded gadgets; the Philippines is one of Southeast Asia’s leading e-waste generators, with an estimated 3.9 kilograms of e-waste per capita in 2019.¹

Despite its vital significance, the dilemma of e-waste in the Philippines has received little attention in the worldwide and national media, hampering efforts to identify long-term solutions. This essay aims to shed light on the environmental impact of e-waste in the Philippines, investigate the factors that contribute to its under-reporting, and review current activities addressing the problem.

E-waste comprises old electrical devices; cell phones, tablets, computers, televisions, and other home gadgets that are outdated or undesirable. These are all examples of e-waste that have become a depressingly common and dangerous sight in the Philippines; based on a report by the Environmental Management Bureau (EMB) of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), the Philippines generated 32,664.41 metric tons of waste electrical and electronic equipment in 2019.² While most e-waste still contains usable materials like valuable metals, it also holds substances that are hazardous to one’s health, the environment, and the climate. As such, the rise of e-waste production and mismanagement in the Philippines is a pressing concern for the country and its future.

The urgency of eliminating e-waste in the Philippines is made clear by its effects on the Philippines’ environment. The country is a haven for a wide variety of aquatic life, including coral reefs, mangrove forests, and endangered species; improper e-waste disposal directly endangers these delicate ecosystems and results in irreparable damage and biodiversity loss. The deterioration of Manila Bay, a cornerstone of the country’s capital, underscores this issue.

Located in the heart of the city, Manila Bay is surrounded by landfills and similar informal disposals loaded with discarded electronics, gadgets, and other sources of e-waste. From there, toxic substances and chemicals seep into the ground and leach into the surrounding waters. Silt sediment samples taken from the bay’s seabed in 2019 reported traces of heavy metals such as mercury, lead, cadmium, arsenic, and zinc which are suggested to be the results of discarded e-waste and factory sewage.³ This has damaged the waters to the extent that most invasive species in other tropical estuarine ports cannot survive in Manila Bay.⁴

Nevertheless, the matter is under-reported both nationally and globally due to several factors. Primarily, limited awareness among the general public about the hazardous nature of e-waste and its detrimental impact on the environment and health prevents the subject from receiving widespread attention. To most, once an electronic outlives its usage, it is discarded with no further thought. According to a study by engineers of the University of the Philippines Department of Environmental Engineering, there were about 22 million mobile phones discarded in 2016, with 95 percent of the respondents of a separate survey having no knowledge of proper e-waste disposal.⁵

Moreover, the complexities of e-waste supply networks make reliable monitoring and tracking of disposal techniques difficult. Given that e-waste trade routes involve several intermediaries, it is difficult to identify guilty parties and hold them accountable for inappropriate disposal. Predatory economic interests similarly contribute to e-waste under-reporting, with more developed countries exporting their electronic garbage to developing countries like the Philippines under the pretense of waste management solutions or other similar misleading terms. In one such case, 25,610 kg of mixed plastic rubbish packaged in 22 sling bags packaged as “assorted electronic accessories” were sent back to Hong Kong after being shipped to Mindanao, the Philippines’ second-largest island.⁶

While the concern of e-waste remains prevalent in the Philippines to this day, efforts are being made to tackle the topic, with the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act (Republic Act No. 9003) passed in 2000. The government act calls for proper waste disposal practices, including e-waste management, and encourages the construction of material recovery facilities, trash separation, and recycling. Additionally, international organizations such as the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) have collaborated with national agencies like the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) to further address this point. One example is the E-Waste ‘to! Iwasto! Project, which hopes to raise awareness of proper e-waste management and provide Filipinos with the means to dispose of their household e-waste properly; through this, the e-waste can be safely salvaged and recycled.⁷

Despite this, however, the Philippines’ lack of infrastructure for safe and efficient e-waste recycling limits the success of any attempts to solve the issue. The government faces challenges in developing recycling sites that are equipped with adequate equipment to handle a wide range of electronic devices, and e-waste is commonly recycled informally “by hand,” which exposes the recyclers to hazardous and carcinogenic substances present.⁸ While progress has been made as UNIDO and the DENR have continued to install more e-waste disposal facilities across the country, it is still a long journey before the problem can be successfully managed in the future.⁹

In conclusion, e-waste in the Philippines demands immediate attention and concerted action. E-waste has troubled the Philippines for decades since the rise of industrialization and globalization, and will likely continue to harm the country’s citizens and environment unless further steps are taken and current efforts are pursued. It is through careful planning and collaboration between the government, organizations, and consumers that the issue of e-waste can finally be resolved; only through collective efforts and knowledge can the environment be safeguarded, human health protected, and a better future ensured for the Philippines and the world at large.

References

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Waste handling site in Patayas, Manila | Image sourced from Global Environment Facility

1. “The Philippines: making money making e-waste safe | UNIDO.” United Nations Industrial Development Organization. (September 28, 2022). https://www.unido.org/news/philippines-making-money-making-e-waste-safe.
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2. “EMB: National policy, regulatory framework already in place for e-waste management.” Department of Environment and Natural Resources. (October 29, 2020). https://www.denr.gov.ph/index.php/news-events/press-releases/1918-emb-national-policy-regulatory-framework-already-in-place-for-e-waste-mngt.
   ↩︎
3. Enano, J. O. “Silt taken from Manila Bay positive for heavy metals.” Inquirer News. (March 21, 2019). https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1098243/silt-taken-from-manila-bay-positive-for-heavy-metals#ixzz5kAhAmLqh.
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4. Vallejo, B. M., Aloy, A., Ocampo, M., Conejar-Espedido, J., & Manubag, L. “Manila Bay Ecology and Associated Invasive Species.” Springer International Publishing: In Coastal research library, 145–169. (2019b). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91382-7_5.
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5. Ballesteros, F., Jr., & Galang, M. “Estimation of Waste Mobile Phones in the Philippines using Neural Networks.” Global Nest Journal, 20(4), 767–772. (2018). https://doi.org/10.30955/gnj.002534.
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6. “Philippines Returns Illegal Plastic and E-Waste Shipment to Hong Kong, China (Groups Insist Philippines Not a Global Trash Bin) | IPEN.” International Pollutants Elimination Network. (2019, June 4). https://ipen.org/news/philippines-returns-illegal-plastic-and-e-waste-shipment-hong-kong-china-groups-insist.
   ↩︎
7. Dilim, J. “E-waste ‘to! Iwasto project reaches La Union.” PIA. (October 28, 2022). https://pia.gov.ph/features/2022/10/28/e-waste-to-iwasto-project-reaches-la-union.
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8. Argosino, F. “How to manage e-waste: Bring to a treatment, storage and disposal facility.” Manila Bulletin. (April 6, 2022). https://mb.com.ph/2022/04/06/how-to-manage-e-waste-bring-to-a-treatment-storage-and-disposal-facility/.
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9. Dilim. “E-waste ‘to! Iwasto project reaches La Union.” https://pia.gov.ph/features/2022/10/28/e-waste-to-iwasto-project-reaches-la-union.
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“Investing in Growth, Innovating for Sustainability”

Typed in sleek white ink, these six words headline a 230-page document complete with modern visuals and trendy environmental buzzwords. They would fit right in at the top of a UN climate report or ecological manifesto, but instead they headline a report from Aramco—the Saudi-owned behemoth of the fossil fuels industry.

While it may seem counterintuitive for the world’s single largest polluter[1] to include net-zero goals and sustainability pledges in its 2022 annual report, Aramco’s climate-conscious rebranding is part of a larger trend within the fossil fuels industry. This tactic (often dubbed “greenwashing”) has been increasingly employed by serial polluters to erect an eco-friendly façade which masks their fundamentally unsustainable business model.

But it wasn’t always this way. As much as Aramco officials like to claim their “journey toward sustainability” began in the 1970’s,[2] a closer look at the company’s past PR causes this narrative to fall apart. During much of the company’s earlier years, Aramco’s branding lacked much of the environmental messaging seen today. Public comments scarcely mentioned “sustainability,” much less in the ecological context Aramco now suggests. The companies’ statements instead remained largely production oriented. In a 1974 article for The New York Times, then Aramco chairman Frank Jungers even boasted about the company’s capacity for sustained oil production stating, “what we have is large reserves‐156 billion barrels of probable reserves and 93 billion barrels of proven reserves, which clearly could support 20 million barrels a day in production on out through the end of the century without any problem at all.”[3]

While talks of increased oil production may not be as popular today, the oil crisis of 1973 left many Americans concerned about the nation’s energy supplies. In 1978, Harris polling found that as many as 79% of Americans thought the US energy shortage would be very or somewhat serious in 10 years’ time.[4] Post-1973 conditions also meant less opportunities to trade with a stagnant Soviet economy.[5] As such, Aramco was eager to market its oil to a Western market that itself was eager to buy.

The most obvious explanation for Aramco’s environmental disregard, however, is also the simplest: climate change wasn’t a mainstream issue until the late 80’s. That all changed in 1988 when after a record-breakingly hot summer, NASA scientist James Hansen delivered a testimony to Congress. His models predicted the existence of global warming with 99% certainty,[6] a fact that shifted public perception and catapulted global warming into the national spotlight. Likely because of this, Aramco’s (and by extension Saudi Arabia’s) strategy during the late 80’s and early 90’s pivoted from feigned ignorance to systematic obstruction.

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was first established in 1988, Saudi delegates worked in conjunction with Western oil interests to adopt as little action as possible, as late as possible. During the 1995 IPCC meeting in Madrid for instance, these representatives fought tirelessly to reword scientific reports with the goal of emphasizing the uncertainty of climate change. “Convincing evidence” was replaced with “some preliminary evidence”; “discernible human influence on global climate” was altered to “appreciable human influence on global climate.”[7] Other efforts at opposition were more blatant such as when then Saudi oil official, Mohammad Al-Sabban, confronted climate scientists claiming the science on humans’ influence on the climate was not settled.[8]

Today though, Saudi Arabia’s (and by extension Aramco’s) opposition to climate change legislation lacks much of the ham-handed antagonism of the early 90’s. A major factor for this was BP’s announcement in 1997 that it would support international greenhouse gas regulation.[9] What followed was a massive paradigm in the oil industry with Shell and several other oil producers following suit. Even the oil-producing Saudi Government jumped on the bandwagon. In 2005, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia officially ratified the Kyoto Protocol s—the same climate change protocols the country had tried to strike down a decade earlier.[10]

Aramco probably deserves some credit where it’s due. In recent years, the company has invested substantial amounts of capital into solar, wind and carbon capture technologies.[11] However, the problem with Aramco’s eco-friendly marketing strategy is not what it promises but rather how it frames those promises. Take Aramco’s headline-grabbing net-zero strategy for instance. While the company has vowed to take steps towards reaching “net-zero emissions” by 2050, Aramco’s definition of net-zero only encompasses the CO2 released during production. This narrative is particularly problematic as it lets the company off the hook for much of its ecological footprint. Even if operational emissions were to reach 0, that doesn’t account for the other 85% of emissions released at the point of consumption.[12] “You can’t decarbonize oil because of the fundamental end-use emissions,” stated former BP geologist, Michael Coffin, in an interview with the Financial Times. “It’s a myth.”[13]

What’s not a myth is the real and pressing danger that climate change poses, especially to countries like Saudi Arabia which have already been dealing with record breaking heat waves.[14] MENA countries are not the only ones who will suffer either. According to a recent UN report, the planet is on track to reach between 2.1 and 2.9 degrees of warming from pre-industrial levels. Not only does this eclipse the Paris Agreement goal of 1.5°C, it could also lead to what some scientists call a “climate breakdown.”[15] Aramco claims to understand this reality in public documents, it fails to recognize to that the decarbonizing fundamentally entails decommissioning (or at least scaling back production). Instead, the company is continuing to scale crude oil production capacity.[16]

We live in an age where young consumers are increasingly concerned about the core-values of the brands they’re buying from.[17] Combine that with our fast-paced, sensationalistic social media culture and it’s easy for serial polluters like Aramco to take advantage. It’s why Aramco’s most recent annual report mentions “sustainability” a staggering 205 times. It’s also why the company is so desperate to brand itself as “net-zero” while simultaneously ramping up production. The way we spend our money matters but for “ethical consumption” to work, we need to first distinguish between real environmental justice and profitable corporate action. Only then can we effectively demand accountability.

References

[1] Webb, Samuel. “Oil Giant Dubbed World’s Worst Polluter Is Now World’s Biggest Company.” The Independent, 12 May 2022, www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/oil-apple-saudi-aramco-climate-pollution-b2077408.html.

[2] “Aramco Started Journey toward Sustainability in 1970s, Says Official.” Arab News, 22 May 2022, www.arabnews.com/node/2087056/business-economy. Accessed 14 May 2023.

[3] Smith, William. “Aramco Adds to Capacity despite Oil Restrictions; Slower Pace Conceded.” The New York Times, 29 Jan. 1974, timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1974/01/29/81859410.html?pageNumber=39. Accessed 14 May 2023.

[4] Fusso, Thomas E. “The Polls: The Energy Crisis in Perspective.” The Public Opinion Quarterly 42, no. 1 (1978): 127–36. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2748098.

[5] Lawson, Fred H. “Review Article: KEYS TO THE KINGDOM: CURRENT SCHOLARSHIP ON SAUDI ARABIA.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43, no. 4 (2011): 737–47. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41308755.

[6] History.com Editors. “Climate Change History.” HISTORY, 6 Oct. 2017, www.history.com/topics/natural-disasters-and-environment/history-of-climate-change#. Accessed 14 May 2023.

[7] Houghton, John. “Madrid 1995: Diagnosing Climate Change.” Nature, vol. 455, no. 7214, Oct. 2008, pp. 737–738, https://doi.org/10.1038/455737a. Accessed 10 Oct. 2019.

[8] Chemnick, Jean. “Oil Kingdom and a “High Priest” Stall Action for 30 Years.” E&E News, 29 Oct. 2018, www.eenews.net/articles/oil-kingdom-and-a-high-priest-stall-action-for-30-years/. Accessed 14 May 2023.

[9] PULVER, SIMONE. “MAKING SENSE OF CORPORATE ENVIRONMENTALISM: An Environmental Contestation Approach to Analyzing the Causes and Consequences of the Climate Change Policy Split in the Oil Industry.” Organization & Environment 20, no. 1 (2007): 44–83. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26162029.

[10] Al-Sarihi, Aisha. “Saudi Arabia and Climate Change: From Systematic Obstructionism to Conditional Acceptance.” Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, 31 Aug. 2018, agsiw.org/saudi-arabia-and-climate-change-from-systematic-obstructionism-to-conditional-acceptance/.

[11] Ugal, Nishant. “Saudi Aramco Poised to Tender Huge Carbon Capture Project Targeting Multiple Gas Plants.” Upstream Online | Latest Oil and Gas News, 19 Jan. 2023, www.upstreamonline.com/exclusive/saudi-aramco-poised-to-tender-huge-carbon-capture-project-targeting-multiple-gas-plants/2-1-1389566?zephr_sso_ott=odr2ic. Accessed 14 May 2023.

[12] O’Connor, Maeve. “Oil Giant Aramco Still Doing Minimum to Tackle Emissions.” Carbon Tracker Initiative, 13 July 2022, carbontracker.org/oil-giant-aramco-still-doing-minimum-to-tackle-emissions/.

[13] “Saudi Aramco Bets on Being the Last Oil Major Standing.” Financial Times, 12 Jan. 2023, www.ft.com/content/513b770b-836b-472b-a058-3e4a95437c69.

[14] Hansen, Kathryn. “Heatwave Scorches the Middle East.” Earthobservatory.nasa.gov, 11 June 2021, earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148430/heatwave-scorches-the-middle-east.

[15] Leffer, Lauren. “These Numbers Are All Wrong.” Gizmodo, 26 Oct. 2022, gizmodo.com/un-report-climate-change-2-degrees-warming-1849704926.

[16] Saudi Aramco. Annual Report 2022.

[17] Kitterman, Ted. “Report: 83% of Millennials Want Brands to Align with Them on Values – PR Daily.” PR Daily, 18 Feb. 2020, www.prdaily.com/report-83-of-millennials-want-brands-to-align-with-them-on-values/.

In his 1958 campaign speech, former United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower declared, “We are busily engaged in the construction of a gigantic road system which will build more than 40,000 miles of superhighways” (Weingroff 1958). Sixty years later, China has far surpassed the United States in infrastructure capacity, having already built more than double that length in expressways domestically (Watanabe 2021). Now, China is contracting the construction of massive infrastructure projects internationally through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a megaproject framework unprecedented in scope spanning Afro-Eurasia (Chatzky 2020). In fact, by 2040, the BRI is estimated to boost global gross domestic product by up to $7.1 trillion while reducing global trade costs by up to 2.2 percent (Hillman 2021). Yet, for all the purported economic benefits, the BRI also comes with far-reaching environmental implications. Currently, fossil fuels make up 80% of China’s overseas energy investments through the BRI, with only 3% going to solar and wind (Hilton 2019). However, China has also pledged to limit the negative environmental impacts caused by the BRI. Although the BRI poses as a green initiative, China’s policies through the BRI have overwhelmingly adverse effects on the environment not only through pernicious coal dumping in developing countries, but also with arctic oil extraction through the Polar Silk Road along with excessive cement production.

The Green Belt and Road Initiative

In light of the increasing pressure regarding the negative environmental implications of the BRI, China has begun introducing BRI “reforms.” On March 28, 2022, China’s National Development and Reform Commission, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Department of Ecology and Environment, and Ministry of Commerce published a joint statement on making the BRI more sustainable by reducing emissions and pollution while protecting biodiversity in BRI nations (de Boer 2022). In 2018, the Green Finance Committee of China and the City of London introduced Green Investment Principles for the BRI, which feature state-owned banks from BRI countries including the United Arab Emirates, Kazakhstan, Thailand, Morocco, Singapore, Pakistan, and Mongolia among its signatories (Wang 2021). Now, while 12.8 gigawatts of Chinese overseas coal projects have been canceled, equivalent to more than one-third of South Korea’s 2021 coal power capacity, 19.2 gigawatts of BRI coal projects have already secured financing, contracts, or permits, and will likely be built. Additionally, no penalties exist for Chinese companies financing coal overseas, and regulations are opaque. In fact, at least two coal projects have already been secured following President Xi Jinping’s late 2021 commitment to end BRI coal projects (Liu 2022), and Chinese banks still finance over 70 percent of coal power plants in the world under the BRI (ANI 2022). Even worse, 7% more coal will be mined in 2022 than in 2021, which Li Shuo, a Greenpeace senior global policy adviser, criticizes by explaining that China’s pursuit of energy security trumps carbon neutrality. Especially since the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party has rested on economic growth since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, which is the keystone of the BRI, economic development is often prioritized over environmental concerns in China. Overall, while being phased out de jure, coal is still a prevalent and damaging de facto part of the BRI.

Coal Catastrophe

In terms of coal alone, China has been exchanging economic growth for environmental sustainability within developing countries through the BRI. For the past few years, Chinese companies have invested heavily in coal power in West African countries like Ghana (Nyabiage 2020). In fact, there have been 1600 coal power plants planned through the BRI (Gokkon 2018), with many still proceeding despite President Xi Jinping’s promise to eliminate coal from the BRI. Even worse, many of the new coal power plants being built are not equipped with efficient carbon capture technology. In fact, of the 240 coal power plants already built in 25 BRI countries, 58 percent were high emission, low energy plants. These plants alone released the equivalent of 11 percent of all CO₂ emissions in the United States (Hilton 2019).

Now, since China is aiming to eliminate coal use domestically to purportedly achieve the goals of the Paris Climate Accords, state-owned coal companies are shifting their operations abroad to developing countries to avoid bankruptcy and continue to stimulate the economy (Feng 2019). Thus, China can domestically build up its renewable energy sector while ensuring its state-owned coal companies have continued capital inflow from developing BRI nations. In fact, to facilitate domestic economic growth, China has historically attempted to offload coal energy to the developing world while ensuring that its state-owned construction companies employ Chinese labor to build those coal factories. Chinese enterprises were encouraged to invest in overseas coal projects in the early 2000s until countries began implementing protectionist policies to ban them (Hao 2017).

With the BRI, there has been a renewed emphasis on providing economic incentives and coercion to offload Chinese coal projects overseas (Hao 2017). Furthermore, the capacity for dumping coal into international markets through the BRI is only increasing as the scale of coal overcapacity in China has grown between 1.721 and 1.819 billion tons from 2017 to 2019 (Wang 2018). Even worse, any coal plants built now will lock developing countries into coal for at least 40 years because nations need to maximize their investments, which means that even if a nation wants to switch to green tech, they are stuck with coal (Inskeep 2019). On the economic front, as coal prices increase due to less global production and as clean air regulation becomes more stringent, many of the current coal power plants being constructed in developing countries will begin operating at a loss, creating a huge moral hazard for BRI investments in coal (Hilton 2019). In fact, while initial investments may be more expensive currently, clean energy sources such as onshore wind farms will become cheaper to operate over time as production capacity ramps up. Devastatingly, these coal plants will increase global coal emissions by 43 percent (Rotter 2017), eventually making BRI countries account for 50 percent of global emissions by 2050, up from 15 percent in 2015 (Zadek 2019). As such, the BRI in its current state will guarantee that the goals outlined in the Paris Climate Accords are not met in many BRI nations.

The Polarizing Polar Silk Road

Overinvestment in coal is not the only negative environmental impact of the BRI – the Polar Silk Road is a BRI initiative aimed at expanding Chinese infrastructure to the Arctic Circle in pursuit of energy, commercial, and geopolitical gains (Nakano 2018). Funded by Chinese money in Russian territory, the Polar Silk Road provides China and Russia access to over 35 trillion dollar’s worth of oil and gas underneath the melting polar ice caps (Jorbenadze 2022). Yet, Russia cannot drill oil in the Arctic without China’s BRI. Since Russia currently lacks the necessary resources to do so, the only way Russia can drill is by constructing new sea and land routes with China’s help (Dillow 2018). Russia requires outside financing and support for technology and Arctic infrastructure development (Gutierrez 2018), which is even more challenging to obtain from elsewhere especially given the massive international sanctions on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. Without China’s funding of the Polar Silk Road, Russia’s past drilling expeditions have failed (Nakano 2018).

Currently, China provides 80% of the equipment and 60% of the funding for Arctic expeditions (Gasper 2018). In the near future, China plans to invest trillions more into the Polar Silk Road (Bennett 2018). Concurrently, Russia has and will continue using the oil money from the Polar Silk Road to fund devastating wars in Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine (Myrie 2022). In the long term, these far north shipping and drilling lanes would only be made possible by accelerating the melting of polar ice caps, which would also cause massive sea-level rise, devastating thousands of coastal cities in exchange for marginal economic growth for China and Russia (Gasper 2018). Ultimately, drilling Arctic oil will lead to over 5 degrees Celsius of global warming (Greenpeace 2015).

Furthermore, given how infrastructure expansion has historically correlated with significant biodiversity loss (Hughes 2018), the Polar Silk Road will also lead to many species becoming extinct. Even worse, the BRI does not implement the best practices to prevent biodiversity loss and actually increases alien species invasions by overlapping global diversity hotspots with high invasive potentials within BRI economic corridors. Ominously, the repercussions of this biodiversity loss will be as severe as those from climate change or nuclear conflicts (Liu 2019). As its cascading effects devastate entire regional food chains, biodiversity loss is a “threat multiplier” that will exacerbate existing conflicts and introduce entirely new struggles between state and non-state actors. Ultimately, biodiversity loss could even fuel the rise of terrorism, as climate change has been linked to the emergence of ISIS in Syria (Torres 2016). The United Nations Security Council corroborates the linkage between climate change and terrorism, highlighting the multiplier effect of climate change and biodiversity loss on poverty, weak governance, and terrorist activity. In fact, of the 15 countries that are most exposed to climate risks, eight have United Nations peacekeeping missions to address terrorism, including Mali, Iraq, and Syria (United Nations 2019).

Sand Storm

In addition to the inimical implications of the Polar Silk Road, BRI projects often also involve cement production and sand dredging, which is terrible for the environment. Cement requires extensive amounts of sand, stone, and energy, and is extensively used in construction (Spiegel 2020). China has been the biggest concrete producer in the world. In fact, if it were a country, the concrete industry would be the world’s third-largest carbon dioxide emitter, responsible for 4-8% of the world’s CO2 emissions (Watts 2019). However, to create concrete, China has been digging up excessive amounts of sand for the past few years, destroying coastline and fishing breeding areas (Apostolopoulou 2021). Now, China is closing its domestic cement plants under new pollution guidelines (Goh 2019) while creating hundreds of heavily polluting cement production lines in BRI countries (McNeice 2017). Furthermore, China is targeting countries with weak emissions and environmental standards and enforcement (Goh 2019). While host countries are responsible for approving high-polluting projects, governments may be lured by the economic benefits posited by Chinese state-owned enterprises (Lelyveld 2019). In fact, countries like Pakistan, which historically have suffered from climate change impacts, actually saw their CO2 emissions increase fourfold after joining the BRI (Zeb 2017). As such, massive infrastructure projects lacking sufficient environmental regulation and international oversight are extremely minacious for developing nations to undertake.

The Pernicious Implications of the Belt and Road Initiative

Ultimately, increasing production of coal, oil, and cement, climate change and melting ice caps will result in devastating heatwaves, decreased air quality, and drastically increased sea levels, leading to deaths, destruction of infrastructure, crops, and dramatically decreased quality of life (The Climate Reality Project 2019). In the long term, BRI projects are estimated to lead to 3 degrees Celsius of global warming (Hicks 19), which puts 4.6 billion people, more than 50% of the world, at risk of poverty (Byers 2018). By eliminating the BRI’s extremely polluting projects, even by only 0.5 degrees Celsius, 153 million lives would be saved by reducing air pollution alone, notwithstanding other factors (Shindell 2018). Therefore, by stopping 3 degrees Celsius of global warming, at least 918 million lives would be saved from the devastating human toll exacted by air pollution.

Besides just the human impact, BRI initiatives result in geopolitical tension with the United States and other Western powers, accelerating Western attempts to expand in BRI regions with their own initiatives like the Blue Dot Network, Build Back Better World, International Development Finance Corporation, and the Quad’s Asia-Africa Growth Corridor. Thus, the BRI could be a threat multiplier, causing disproportionate amounts of environmental devastation given its cheaper sticker tag pressuring Western initiatives to overlook onerous ecological regulations in developing countries to catch up with the BRI.

Potential Solutions

To alleviate some of the environmental issues propagated by the BRI, the United States and its allies should consider negotiating with China to create minimum infrastructure project standards. As such, multilateral infrastructure summits focusing on improving the environmental and social impacts of the BRI can push China toward making the BRI more transparent while potentially facilitating multilateral BRI projects (Economy 2018). Through working on multilateral solutions with China, a high-stakes infrastructure and development arms race where more projects are approved without proper environmental and safety regulations could be avoided. In a similar vein, joining the BRI could also aid in promoting American soft power as a counterbalance to China’s in many developing nations (Lind 2018).

In tandem, the international media should focus on the political, economic, and social implications of specific BRI projects (Chen 2019). Thus, given the current opaqueness of many BRI projects, citizens of BRI nations would have a better chance of being able to judge for themselves whether the benefits of specific BRI projects outweigh the harms. Especially with the proliferation of digital social media networks, political and environmental activism has become even more effective in terms of facilitating dissenting opinions and organizing protests. Often, the most effective change starts from within.

Conclusion

While it may promote economic growth and infrastructure development in developing countries, the BRI ultimately pushes forward a trifecta of environmental devastation in the forms of coal, the Polar Silk Road, and biodiversity loss. As such, it is integral to work comprehensively toward multilateral environmental solutions within the BRI and for Chinese companies and other nations to consider the ramifications of the BRI before signing on to a BRI-backed infrastructure project. Without carefully considering the environmental costs of the BRI, both from individual companies participating in the initiative on the microscale and countries signing on to the initiative on the macroscale, BRI participants may well cause billions to be killed or impoverished by the impacts of climate change.

Bibliography

Apostolopoulou, Elia. 2021. “How China’s Belt and Road Initiative Is Changing Cities – and Threatening Communities.” The Conversation, February 21. https://theconversation.com/how-chinas-belt-and-road-initiative-is-changing-cities-and-threatening-communities-153515.

Bennett, Mia. 2018. “Along the Polar Silk Road, China Breaks the Ice.” China-U.S. Focus, November 1. https://www.chinausfocus.com/finance-economy/along-the-polar-silk-road-china-breaks-the-ice.

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In recent years, the state of countries in the Middle East and Northern African (MENA) region have painted a disturbing picture of the world ragged with emerging climate catastrophe. Although the implications of climate change are truly global in nature, MENA countries, in particular, are looking at a horrific future that includes the destruction of crucial infrastructure and massive loss of life, if necessary and desperate measures are not taken in time. From flash floods in Turkey^[1] to wild forest fires in Algeria^[2] and increasing threats of drought, deforestation, and flooding –- the MENA region as a whole has already started to bear the burden of an untamed natural crisis. 

Multiple investigative reports and extensive studies targeted at exploring the degree of climate disasters have concluded that several Middle Eastern states are on the verge of confronting disaster. In 2016, Iran lost dozens of its citizens to smog and polluted air quality^[3], while Turkey recently battled wild forest fires and flash floods simultaneously. Both of these disasters, not only claimed scores of human lives but also destroyed livelihoods, infrastructure worth billions of dollars alongside natural habitats. In June 2020, a report published by Science Advance argued that if the average temperature in the MENA region remains as high as it has been, parts of the region might become completely uninhabitable in the near future.^[4]

Besides falling victim to regular natural disasters, Middle Eastern states also suffer from the constant dumping of hazardous material. Tons of illegal, non-renewable plastic waste is exported from the United Kingdom and Germany to landfills in Turkey every year. According to some accounts, in 2020 alone, almost 40% of the UK’s plastic waste ended up in Turkey.^[5] However, such an exploitative approach to the mitigation of climate change is destined to provide a surface level and shallow solution to approaching perils. Whereas, the need of the hour is to formulate a comprehensive, all-inclusive, and practically deliverable policy regarding inevitable disaster. Instead of making the global south suffer from the calamities of emerging catastrophe alone, the global north must up the ante of reasonable and urgent action by efficiently handling perilous material responsibly and rationally. 

Meanwhile, states like Syria are at risk of what experts are calling ‘conflict-linked pollution flashpoints’, based on decades of conflict that have complicated governance in the region to a point that coastal oil spills have become a horrific but regular reality.^[6] In the middle of such series of events, Saudi Green Initiative (SGI) appears to be a breath of fresh air. Although it aspires to take the lead in restoring the climate balance of the region by decreasing Kingdom’s fossil fuel emissions and fully adopting the Net-zero approach by 2060^[7], yet it doesn’t cover the entire region. Most MENA states are, directly or indirectly, still dependent on conventional sources of energy and carbon emission. A shift to affordable, renewable energy will require more than lengthy speeches and impractical promises across all levels. World leaders must look beyond their limited political agendas and short-term electoral interests, instead their commitment to climate action needs to be universal and immediately effective.  

A proactive and pragmatic approach to meet the mitigating goals and avert the unfolding climate cataclysm in the MENA region is essential for reversing and halting the negative implications. The COP26, or UN Climate Change Conference, that was convened at Glasgow recently provided a vital platform for an in-depth insight into present affairs and for an overview of mounting challenges that the region is facing or will face in the coming decades. However, only a regionally-engaged, politically-practical and jointly-executable climate plan can successfully secure the future of MENA states. Upholding the true spirit of the Paris Climate Agreement is mandatory for any summit or conference on climate action to achieve desirable ends. 

Given the scale of implications, MENA states must sincerely take up the climate cause. Individually, bilaterally or multilaterally, measures should be taken to meet policy goals and formulate a stable regional approach. For, if climate question is left unresponsive even by a single regional state, then all are bound to suffer repercussions regardless.    

References:

^[1] “Flash Floods in Turkey Kill 59, and Dozens Are Still Missing”, The New York Times, August, 15, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/15/world/europe/turkey-floods.html

^[2] Mezahi, Maher, “Algeria’s desperate wildfire fight: Buckets and branches”, BBC News, August, 22, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-58269789 

^[3] Lila, Muhammad, “Tehran smog blamed for hundreds of deaths”, CNN, November, 17, 2017, https://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/17/middleeast/tehran-smog-deaths-iran/index.html

^[4] Raymond, Colin, Tom Matthews, and Radley M. Horton. “The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance.” Science Advances 6, no. 19 (2020): eaaw1838.

^[5] Greenpeace International, “Investigation finds plastic from the UK and Germany illegally dumped in Turkey”, May, 17, 2021, https://www.greenpeace.org/international/press-release/47759/investigation-finds-plastic-from-the-uk-and-germany-illegally-dumped-in-turkey/

^[6] PAX “Environment and Conflict Alert 4 Baniyas: An Environmental Disaster in the Making’, October, 19, 2021, https://paxvoorvrede.nl/media/download/PAX_ECA_Baniyas_FIN_lowres.pdf

^[7] Krimly, Reem, “Saudi Arabia’s Green Initiative plan for net zero emissions explained”, Al Arabia English, October, 24, 2021, https://english.alarabiya.net/News/gulf/2021/10/24/Saudi-Arabia-s-Green-Initiative-plan-for-net-zero-emissions-explained

Analyzing the interactions between capitalism, colonialism, and the field of international development in Latin America, this paper explores small-scale, community solar development as a potential solution to the climate crisis as it unfolds in Bolivia. Bolivia has one of the largest indigenous populations in Latin America and is on the frontlines of the climate crisis. The unique geographical landscape of climatic extremes of the Andean nation on the one hand makes its natural environment particularly vulnerable to climate change but on the other hand endows it with tremendous potential for decentralized solar energy. After identifying the inextricable links between capitalism, colonial expansion into Latin America, and extractivist modes of wealth, this paper posits that Bolivia’s modern extractivist development model is a form of neocolonial oppression imposed by Western powers to maintain their dominance in Latin America. Within this analytical framework, the paper goes on to critique systems of international development that perpetuate colonial systems of oppression and provide false solutions to the environmental damage and social inequities created by capitalist expansion. Finally, the paper presents the prospect of using community-based solar systems as alternative forms of development in Bolivia that not only promote climate resilience but also counteract extractive economies and empower marginalized communities. Ultimately, these community solar projects can serve as small-scale models for the remaking of global economic and political systems, which is essential to ensure justice and sustainability for all.

The Climate Crisis and Searching for Alternatives 

The climate crisis of today is a catastrophic convergence of capitalism and colonialism. Capitalism’s propensity to obsess people with the accumulation of capital for profit by any means necessary led to the creation and exploitation of colonial economies in order to feed its insatiable need for more– more capital, more land, and more labor to work the land and produce more capital. This search for increasing capital and profit has altered the climatic systems of the Earth.

Now, we must search for alternatives. We must transform economies around the world from those based upon capitalist structures of extractivism and fossil fuel dependency to those fueled by clean, renewable energy and regenerative livelihoods. Economies must be localized, scaled down, and decoupled from the neoliberal concept of growth; unfettered capitalist-oriented economic growth has severely damaged the planet and its peoples. We must also remedy the legacies of colonialism that continue to oppress historically marginalized communities across the world. Neocolonial systems of oppression often take the form of post-colonial development strategies which, in the name of progress, remake the Global South in the image of the Global North in a process that eerily mirrors an era declared bygone by historians.

Bolivia, an Andean nation with thirty-six recognized indigenous peoples and nearly half of its population identifying as indigenous, acutely experiences the compounding oppressions of global capitalism, neocolonialism, neoliberalism, and extractivism.^[1] Formerly a Spanish colony, Bolivia was run by European-descendant men until 2006, when Aymara coca farmer Evo Morales became the country’s first indigenous president. Vehemently adored by most of Bolivia’s indigenous population, “Evo” became celebrated for his dedication to decolonizing the Bolivian state: in 2009, he oversaw the creation of a new constitution renaming Bolivia the “Plurinational State of Bolivia” to recognize the thirty-six different indigenous nations and codifying indigenous rights and forms of cultural, political, and juridical autonomy.^[2] Morales was also widely praised for his commitment to environmental preservation: in 2010, the Plurinational Assembly of Bolivia passed the Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, which recognized the Andean cosmovision that places the earth deity Pachamama at the center of all life.^[3]

Despite Evo’s momentous efforts towards decolonization, indigenous empowerment, and environment protection, his thirteen-year presidential term continued to promote a neoliberal, extractivist development model that stood in direct opposition to his initial campaign promises and eventually contributed to his forced resignation in November of 2019. While Evo’s legacy is one of anti-capitalist, indigenous resistance, his prolonged tenure also launched the post-colonial state on a path of unprecedented extractivist development.

There must be a path towards development in Bolivia other than Morales’ extractivist model, which enhances climate resilience and encourages self-sufficiency among Bolivia’s indigenous communities while also promoting local wealth. Community-owned solar systems offer a solution to all of the above. Solar-power is the most easily accessible and deployable of renewable energies. Small-scale solar systems, e.g. rooftop photovoltaic panels or small, community-sized solar fields, enable electrification for rural or marginalized communities that have been disconnected from national grids. More importantly, solar power allows communities to remain disconnected, preserving their energy independence from the state and securing their resilience to natural disasters that may wipe out any electric grid constructed.

While community solar development is not inherently decolonial, it can contribute to the process of decolonization. When solar power is introduced to communities on a small-scale, when community members are trained on how to use and fix their solar systems, when they are given ownership over the electricity generated by the panels and are able to decide how to use that energy to benefit their community, solar development works to dismantle colonial power structures and empowers the formerly oppressed while meaningfully boosting local climate resilience. While not the only solution to the climate crisis, community solar systems provide a multifaceted solution that targets the roots of capitalist, extractivist, and colonialist development that led to the climate crisis we face today.

Evo Morales, Empty Promises, and Indigenous Resistance

Though not without occasional bouts of discontent, Morales’ previously widespread indigenous support began to reveal its growing disapproval in 2010 at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. In protest of the lack of centrality of indigenous issues at Morales’ conference, groups of Bolivians convened a parallel event — Mesa 18.^[4] Aguirre and Cooper argue that “it was one of the first and probably one of the most visible public expressions of wariness toward the Morales administration from his social-movement base.”^[5] The main source of contention from the counter-protestors were the contradictions between Morales’ development projects and his commitment to environmental sustainability and indigenous rights. Protestors argued that Bolivia’s development projects, such as the proposed Trans-Oceanic Highway through Cochabamba and the Beni region of the Amazon, and the $2 billion hydroelectric dam Cashuela Esperanza to be constructed on the Beni River, would destroy ecologically sensitive areas and infringe upon indigenous rights.^[6] Participants of Mesa 18 implored that these natural resources belong to communities, not the state, and therefore must be managed through local community structures.^[7] Rafael Quispe, one of the leaders of the National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu, Bolivia’s largest indigenous organization, argued that “the [economics] models that we’ve known until now are socialism and capitalism, but both are Western, both are extractivist, developmentalist, consumerist, and predatory. These models violate the rights of Mother Earth, and if President Evo Morales expresses that we are in a socialist model then he violates the Mother Earth.”^[8]

These grievances expressed by indigenous leaders are a far cry from the waves of indigenous support that elected Evo Morales and his Movimiento Al Socialismo (MAS) party into office in 2006. Following the explosive 2005 gas wars, in which the radical leftist indigenous bloc rose up in street protests, road blockades and massive marches to the capital in protest of gas privatization, Morales consolidated his support from the Bolivian indigenous majority by presenting himself as one of them, as a warrior of indigenous struggle, and as an alternative to the capitalist, neoliberal, and neocolonial Mesa administration.^[9] To many, Evo represented liberation from white supremacy and from colonial oppression, and that was enough to give him unprecedented power that continued to grow until his recent resignation in response to massive public outcry against his overextended and contested presidential term.

Despite Evo’s campaign promises and intentions to transform Bolivia’s economic development, the country has continued to follow a development model defined by neoliberalism and extractivism. Extractivism can be understood as a regime of capital accumulation derived from the appropriation of nature and oriented towards primary commodity export.^[10] In Bolivia, extractivism exists in its purest form in the mining sector, which expanded drastically under the Morales administration and consolidated the country’s resource governance.^[11] Though promising indigenous autonomy and post-neoliberal reforms, President Morales resulted to the selling of “Third World resources to the most convenient bidder, of degrading their physical and human ecologies, of killing and torturing, of condemning their indigenous populations to near extinction.”^[12]

Perhaps the first major sign of the Morales administration’s condemnation of the very people who elected him and with whom he himself identifies was his TIPNIS highway proposal. In 2011, Bolivia saw an explosion of indigenous-led mobilization in protest of a proposed 190-mile highway that would cut through the Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park, known as TIPNIS.^[13] To the Morales administration, the highway represents a crucial step in alleviating poverty for the many indigenous people who reside within the TIPNIS, affording them better access to infrastructure and services. Proponents also argue that the primary beneficiaries of development within TIPNIS — i.e. hydrocarbon exploration– would be indigenous communities.^[14] However, according to a 2011 study by the Bolivian Institute for Strategic Research, the highway would increase deforestation in the park by 64% within 15 years of the road’s construction by allowing access to illegal loggers and farmers.^[15] In addition, indigenous communities remained skeptical that they would receive benefits from the development projects, when historically they have suffered the brunt of ecological and human health externalities of extractive development. In response, thousands of TIPNIS residents—mostly indigenous—began to march the 360 miles from the Amazon lowlands to the capital, La Paz, in August of 2011.^[16] Police brutality against the marchers ensued, in which 70 were wounded.^[17] In response to international outcry, President Morales agreed to cancel the construction in October of 2011, signing a law that banned the road’s construction and designating the reserve as “untouchable.”^[18] However, just six years later, in August of 2017, Morales reneged on his commitment. He passed a new law that ended TIPNIS’s protected status, thus paving the way for the highway’s construction.^[19] In Bolivia, the TIPNIS struggle laid bare the blatant contradictions between Morales’ political platform and his actual policies.

Morales’ seeming loyalty to natural resource extraction, however, might be less a failure of Morales’ attempts to wrest the economy away from extraction and more of a condition of the global capitalist market that makes it impossible for alternative development models to exist and thrive. Andreucci and Radhuber argue that “the expansion of extractivism has been related to the reproduction of political economic conditions established under neoliberalism.”^[20] These neoliberal conditions prevented Morales’ MAS party from implementing more of the radical demands of his indigenous social movement base, namely indigenous autonomy, plurinationalism, decolonization, and communitarian economies. Instead, the global economic reality in which neoliberalism and extractivism remain dominant and thus profitable forced Morales to rely on short-term rents from extraction to maintain political legitimacy.^[21] The Morales’ government’s inability or reluctance to undertake structural, macroeconomic reform is even reflected in the new constitution rewritten by Morales in 2009, in which mining is still explicitly favored over indigenous and communal forms of economic productivity such as agriculture.^[22] While the 2009 constitution recognizes that “communities have a right to autonomous indigenous territorial administration, to a healthy environment and to practice their traditional political legal and economic forms,” mining activities are given a higher value than agriculture when both are competing for land use rights.^[23] It is clear from the Morales administration’s counter-neoliberal rhetoric on one hand, and extractive, neoliberal policies on the other, that larger political and economic forces favoring neoliberalism and extractivism limited the Bolivian government’s ability to realize its counter-neoliberal reforms while maintaining political viability. In Bolivia, as in other Latin American countries, it seems that the two goals exist in mutual conflict.  

Geographers and urban studies scholars Benjamin Kohl and Linda Farthing similarly argue that there is an inherent conflict between the demands of anti-capitalist, anti-extractivist Bolivian social movements and the realities of economies long dependent on extractivism for their wealth. This conflict inevitably limits the ability of government policy to address these concerns and, thus, fuels social unrest.^[24] Even though the Morales government partially succeeded in using revenue, primarily from gas production, to substantially reduce poverty rates in Bolivia—the percentage of people living in poverty fell from 59.9% in 2006, when Morales first came to power, to 34.6% in 2017, and extreme poverty reduced by more than half (from 38.28% to 15.2%) over the same period^[25]— these improvements in quality of life were the result of extractive processes, and ultimately “have proven insufficient to create sustainable broad-based development.”^[26] Short-term profits from extractive industries reduce the government’s incentive to invest in other sectors, thus funneling national resources into one form of economic development and hindering more multifaceted, sustainable development.^[27]    

Bolivia’s natural resources continue to mostly benefit Bolivia’s wealthy and their foreign partners, while country’s poorest (who are largely indigenous) are condemned to poverty and the effects of environmental contamination, and even death at times. Despite the Morales administration’s new legal frameworks protecting environmental and indigenous rights, environmental regulations have proven effective on paper but not in practice. Thus, the mining sector and other extractive industries have continued benefitting not only from Bolivia’s lax environmental protections, but also through lenient regulations that incentivize extractive operations to the detriment of ecological well-being and indigenous livelihoods.

Revenues from natural resource extraction in Bolivia have increased significantly under the Morales administration, but the majority of the wealth going to private multinational firms and the government.^[28] Needing to maintain its promise to alleviate poverty, especially among indigenous communities, Morales began to approve new exploitative projects at the beginning of his second term that would provide the state with the capital it needed to reinvest in social programs while also covering state expenses.^[29] It was around this moment that the failure of alternative development models to succeed in a capitalist global economy was realized. Subsequently, the Bolivian government approved a series of megaprojects based on the expansion of extractive industries, including lithium exploration, mining operations, road and large hydroelectric dam construction.^[30]

According to Kohl and Farthing, oil and gas profits—which accounts for more than half of Bolivia’s state revenues—increased from $173 million in 2002 to more than $2.2 billion in 2011.^[31] Similarly, Bolivia’s mineral exports—with zinc, tin, and silver as the three most heavily exported—grew from $346 million in 2005 to around $3.5 billion by 2011.^[32] The total value of exports increased from $412 million between 1999-2005 to $2.258 billion between 2006-2012, an astonishing 448% increase.^[33] However, only about $350 million in mining royalties and other taxes were collected by the state, which amount to only around 10% of production value.^[34] This demonstrates while a large percentage of governmental revenue stems from hydrocarbon extraction (around 40% in 2008), foreign companies continue to extort and profit from a disproportionate amount of Bolivia’s natural resource wealth.^[35] With the persistent lack of state-owned capital, Morales turned to the very countries profiting off Bolivia’s resources to ask for more money to finance government operations and services: foreign direct investment (FDI) ballooned from $20 million in 2003 to $651 million in 2011, and FDI stocks represented 37% of Bolivia’s Gross Domestic Product in 2010, which was 10% higher than the South American average.^[36]

Morales’ deference to extractivism persisted and strengthened throughout his presidency. On August 28, 2019, Bolivia exported its first shipment of beef to China.^[37] Forty-eight tons of beef from the Santa Cruz Cattlemen’s Federation were sent on that day, with plans to export 8,000 more tons to China in 2019. Bolivian cattle ranching has the prospect of bringing in $800 million for the country, as the commercial beef market expands from China to other target markets such as Russia.^[38] Around the same time that this shipment occurred, unprecedented forest fires ravaged millions of hectares of forest and pasture land in Bolivia, mainly in the tropical savannah region of Chiquitania and Pantana, home to the world’s largest marshlands. These fires were not naturally-occuring; rather, they were caused by the practice of slash-and-burn agriculture used by Bolivian farmers to prepare their land for commercial cattle ranching, among other environmentally-destructive agricultural industries.^[39]

What’s worse, these devastating practices were permitted by the Morales administration: in July of 2019, Morales passed a decree that allows controlled burns for agricultural purposes.^[40] Not only did Morales deny that the fires were caused by the decree, claiming that the clearing was done illegally by farmers, he also refused to accept international aid to control the fires in a political move mirroring Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro’s claim that accepting international aid to quell fires in Brazil’s Amazon violated the country’s sovereignty.^[41] Both Bolsonaro and Morales’ unquestionably destructive agricultural policies contribute to the deforestation of the Amazon and the violation of indigenous rights: the Bolivian livestock sector alone has caused 60% of the country’s deforestation.^[42] Nonetheless, Morales stated on August 30, 2019 that the fundamental bases for Bolivia’s economic growth are “energy, hydrocarbons, mining, agriculture, and scientific knowledge,” verbally solidifying the dominance of extractive development in Bolivia as forest fires actively violated the environmental and indigenous rights he had promised to uphold.^[43]

In a chaotic tumult of electoral fraud accusations, constitutional violations, road blockades and violent protests, Evo Morales was forced to resign from the Bolivian presidency on November 10, 2019.^[44] Though innumerable factors contributed to his resignation—namely the fact that he was vying for a fourth presidential term that was deemed unconstitutional by the constitution he wrote but changed to accommodate his desire for a longer tenure—his approval had waned among indigenous and non-indigenous populations in Bolivia over the years.^[45] Evo’s laggard and inadequate response to quelling the forest fires in Chiquitania mentioned above—the most recent in a decade-long pattern of prioritizing industrialization over environmental protection—contributed significantly to the demise in his popularity.^[46] Evo’s successor, President Jeanine Añez, while more visibly committed to democratic procedures and establishing new elections, threatens to undo the decades of progress secured by Evo on indigenous rights. Similarly, her religiously and politically conservative cabinet is unlikely to prioritize a decolonial agenda that decouples Bolivia’s economic growth from extractivist, capitalist development projects. Thus, the political, economic, and social future of Bolivia is tragically uncertain, and relying on the post-colonial state for sustainable development is difficult to achieve. Nonetheless, sustainable development at the community level outside of the entrapments of the state is achievable and, more importantly, necessary to provide Bolivia’s most marginalized and indigenous populations with the autonomy, resilience and prosperity they deserve.

Development as a Form of Neocolonialism

Bolivia’s protracted extractivist development is as much about power dynamics as it is about money. The enduring legacy of colonialism in Bolivia undeniably shapes Bolivia’s current economic model, and its dependency on extractivism despite widespread popular protests against this model and in support of more communitarian, locally-controlled, and environmentally just development must be understood in terms of its colonial history.

Argentine sociologist Maristella Svampa elucidates on the paradoxical role that post-colonial South American nations such as Bolivia take on in their efforts to grow economically post-independence, writing,

[e]ven when these nations try to break free from their colonial heritage, that is, their dependence on the export of primary products, through the implementation of development plans directed at diversifying their economies, they generally need foreign currency to achieve this. But they can only access foreign currency by exporting primary products, which again increases their dependence on exports. Paradoxically, by trying to exploit their comparative advantages, these countries that are exporters of natural assets, are frequently reassuming their colonial role as exporters of primary products- a role now redefined in terms of the neoliberal rationality of globalising capitalism. For them, neocolonialism is the next step on from post-colonialism.^[47]

Svampa identifies this post-independence reliance on natural resource exports and foreign currency for development projects as a form of “neocolonialism.” She also notes that Bolivia leads this neocolonial development trend, as 92.9% of Bolivia’s exports are primary products.^[48] This process of neocolonization via extractivist development is far from sustainable: instead, it leads to “the consolidation of export enclaves with little or no connection to local chains of production,” foments social conflict and generates regional fragmentation.^[49]

Colonialism, capitalism, and development are inextricably linked and mutually reinforcing. Colonialism was a necessary byproduct of the expansion of capitalism. European growth during the eighteenth century coincided with its transition to capitalism. It is not a coincidence that as capitalist Europe grew, so did the Atlantic slave trade; the increasing demand for tropical commodities required a substantial and free labor force to meet the European demand while securing as much profit as possible for owners of capital.^[50] As European colonialism seeped into the Americas, so too did the production of commodities for export from extractive industries and tropical agriculture. Development studies scholar Henry Bernstein argues that “the idea of development was established by the late colonial period— and moreover the idea of development as a process in which state funding, agencies, and initiatives had a central role to play.”^[51] “Development” thus became a justification for colonialism as an ideology of progress. Because colonialism exported the social inequities inherent to European capitalist society (i.e. class divisions between laborers and capital-owners) to its overseas colonies, development became the tool by which colonial powers could “contain and manage the potential social disorder of the dynamics of immanent (or unchecked) capitalist development.”^[52] Columbian-American anthropologist Arturo Escobar calls this tool a “politics of poverty,” upon which the new order of capitalism and modernity relied to transform the rest of the world in its mirror image “by turning the poor into objects of knowledge and management.”^[53] This management of social ills was then placed in the hands of those who had created them in the first place: the colonial state.^[54] When the World Bank (an inherently colonial apparatus designed for the specific purpose of keeping post-colonial states indebted to former colonial powers) in 1948 defined those countries with annual income per capita below $100 as “poor,” the problem became one of insufficient income, meaning the solution was clearly economic growth.^[55] Thus, development is no more a tool of “progress” than it is a means of perpetuating colonial rule and the systems of oppression inherent within colonialism. “Development” is a tool of oppression invented by the Western elite to maintain dominance over societies it deems inferior, qua the world outside of Western Europe and North America. As Bernstein states, “it is impossible to divorce the idea of ‘development’ from colonial processes and rationales.”^[56]

This intrinsic relationship between colonialism, capitalism, and development is crucial in understanding the economic trajectory of many post-colonial states, namely Bolivia. The “rational” and “scientific” doctrines of development utilized by colonial authorities in European colonies were never appropriate for the environmental and social conditions of the colonies since these doctrines were developed by Western societies, for Western societies. The pathway of development promulgated by Western countries “conformed to the ideas and expectations of the affluent West, to what the Western countries judged to be a normal course of evolution and progress.”^[57] Economic growth in the hands of Western countries meant “the replication in the poor countries of those conditions characteristics of mature capitalist ones,” including industrialization, urbanization, agricultural modernization, infrastructure, social services like health care, and Western education.^[58] As Escobar writes,

the discourse privileged the promotion of cash crops (to secure foreign exchange, according to capital and technological imperatives) and not food crops; centralized planning (to satisfy economic and knowledge requirements) but not participatory and decentralized approaches; agricultural development based on large mechanized farms and the use of chemical inputs but not alternative agricultural systems, based on smaller farms, ecological considerations, and integrated cropping and pest management; rapid economic growth but not the articulation of internal markets to satisfy the needs of the majority of the people; and capital-intensive but not labor-intensive solutions.^[59]

 Within the practice development exists an inherent power dynamic that values Western technical knowledge and conceptions of progress and devalues local, indigenous knowledge and livelihoods. To those working in the field of development, the villager is someone who can never and will never “understand” what is best for them, because what is best for them is only known by Westerners and defined by the Western ideology of progress.^[60] Because many indigenous livelihoods do not fit within this ideology, they are dismissed and disparaged as backwards, deficient, and ignorant.

 When colonial authorities retreated physically from their colonies post-independence, they left in many instances broken societies: neither the imposed Western institutions nor local livelihoods remained intact. The economic and political struggles of these post-colonial states, in attempting to reclaim their autonomy from European-dominated institutions while maintaining social stability, were then unjustly blamed on the cultures of these post-colonial states, when in fact blame lies exclusively with the colonial powers. This uneven post-colonial development thus “inherited, adapted, reproduced, and in some instances reinforced many of the specific ideas and methods of colonial doctrines of development and their constructions of modernity: what it means to be modern, and how to get there.”^[61]

This imposed modernity on post-colonial states by their metropoles was another form of colonialism, “a strategy to remake the colonial world and restructure the relations between colonies and metropoles” to ensure continued domination by the West.^[62] In a word, neocolonialism. To Kwame Nkrumah, the first Prime Minister and President of Ghana, neocolonialism “represents imperialism in its final and perhaps its most dangerous stage.”^[63] Neocolonialism is a process by which colonial territories are fragmented into smaller “non-viable states which are incapable of independent development,” and therefore must rely on their former colonial powers for economic and political stability.^[64] The idea of foreign aid is inherently neocolonial; Nkrumah writes, “in order to make it attractive to those upon whom it is practiced it must be shown as capable of raising their living standards, but the economic object of neocolonialism is to keep those standards depressed in the interest of the developed countries.”^[65] The field of international development, then, is predicated on maintaining a historical power dynamic between “developed” and “developing” countries, in which “aid” to a post-colonial state becomes nothing more than a predatory investment in the sustained oppression of the former colony from which the metropole extracts ever-increasing profits.^[66] From this definition of neocolonialism provided by Nkrumah, it is clear that development is a perpetuation of colonial oppression within post-colonial states, and only by breaking free of this imported model of progress can these countries engage in a process of true decolonization.

Perhaps the most detrimental aspect of neocolonial development is how it ultimately disempowers post-colonial states into accepting defeat, into enabling oppression. This defeat comes when those in the Third World come to “think of themselves as inferior, underdeveloped, and ignorant and to doubt the value of their own culture, deciding instead to pledge allegiance to the banners of reason and progress.”^[67] The Global South will never be deemed “developed” by the “developed” world (i.e. the Global North) because doing so would invalidate the systems of oppression (white supremacy, global capitalism, colonialism) that ensure that the Global South is perpetually “developing” while the Global North remains powerful. Thus, development must be seen for what it really is: an impossible paradox.  

Community Solar: An Alternative Path of Development

In this sense, community-scale development is not an inherently de-colonial project. In some cases, it can replicate colonial systems of oppression at the community level by delegitimizing local knowledge, disempowering community agency and preventing local self-sufficiency. Done right, however, community solar projects can redress and avoid the neocolonial tendencies of international development efforts by providing local communities with the tools and resources they need to grow sustainably and without outside assistance.

The kind of community development exemplified by community solar projects represents what development studies scholars Sam Hickey and Giles Mohan call a “radical politics of development” that situates development within a “process of social change rather than a discrete technocratic intervention.”^[68] Organizations, often NGOs, that provide community solar projects, must be less like “public service providers” and more like “civic actors” that empower the communities in which they work through advocating for equity and rights-based political agendas, and working alongside local social movements.^[69] Working in opposition to extractive development models, community solar projects have the potential to create an alternative form of politics within the societies they operate, a politics that remedies past harms of colonial oppression and democratizes decision-making. Only this kind of community development will foster climate resilience and community well-being. Similarly, geographers and international development scholars Diana Mitlin, Sam Hickey and Anthony Bebbington argue that NGO-led community development must be understood as a “long-term process of social change” that can either perpetuate harmful hegemonies or forge new counter-hegemonies.^[70] In this sense, community development is much more than an economic mechanism, but rather a process of transforming society into the localized, community-based and climate resilient world that will remedy the climate crisis.

Anthropologist Dana Powell explores this process of transformation in her analysis of renewable energy projects on Native American reservations in the United States. She views this proliferation of these projects “as new modes of economic, ecological, and cultural development” that counter “the history of bio-political regimes of natural resource extraction, which have marked indigenous experience in North America” as well as in South America.^[71] In North and South America alike, indigenous people share a common struggle against state-sanctioned resource extraction that destroys indigenous land, culture, and lives. According to Powell, renewable energy, specifically wind and solar projects, have become “technologies of resistance and existence”^[72] that liberate indigenous populations from the oppression of biopower, which she defines as “the power of the state ‘to make live and let die’” in its ruthless pursuit of unfettered economic growth.^[73] In 2003, the first utility-scale, indigenous-owned and operated wind turbine was installed on the Rosebud Sicangu Lakota reservation in South Dakota.^[74] The project was imagined and executed by local and regional activists and engineers, including the tribal government, the Intertribal Council on Utility Policy, and the indigenous NGO Honor The Earth, but was funded by state agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Departments of Energy, Interior, and Agriculture.^[75] Twenty years earlier, Hopi engineers, activists, and tribal leaders began installing solar panels on rooftops of residences on the reservation.^[76] More recently, national networks and cultural protection organizations have collaborated to install additional solar technologies on New Segobia, or Western Shoshone territory, on the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation, and on the Navajo reservation.^[77]

While these community-based renewable energy projects allow Native Americans to harness the wind and sun for their own power production, they remain imperfect in that they still rely on the post-colonial state apparatus for support, mainly funding. Although the geopolitics of Bolivia’s indigenous population differs vastly from that in the United States, this reliance on state agencies and foreign NGOs for funding is also a reality of many community solar projects in Bolivia. However, once a community solar project is implemented, it allows the community to take ownership of their power—literally and metaphorically—and thus facilitates the transition to self-sufficiency. Even though community solar projects are not completely de-colonial in nature, they nonetheless contribute to the process of decolonization necessary for the liberation of indigenous people in Bolivia and elsewhere.

Ultimately, community solar development is part of a larger societal transformation towards regenerative, autonomous and localized growth that feminist scholar Maria Mies terms the “subsistence perspective.”^[78] The subsistence perspective is one in which the sole purpose is life for life, not for the accumulation of capital that has led to the current climate crisis.^[79] According to Mies, “‘subsistence’ denotes a rejection of every form of colonialism, expansionism, and dependence” and instead calls for a shift towards regionalism, self-sufficiency in place of market dependence, organic agriculture, food sovereignty, and grassroots democracy.^[80] This subsistence lifestyle leads to regional, autonomous economies that are the antithesis of global capitalism and thus the solution to the climate crisis. Community solar contributes to a subsistence lifestyle by promoting energy independence, climate resilience, and local wealth that exists outside of the capitalist market and neocolonial development.

Community Solar Projects in Bolivia

Despite Bolivia’s extremely high solar potential, solar energy provides only two megawatts of Bolivia’s total energy supply.^[81] Bolivia’s weakest solar radiation is equivalent to Europe’s strongest solar radiation, at about four sun hours per square meter per day.^[82] In other words, Bolivia’s proximity to the equator combined with its relatively cloudless weather makes for extremely productive solar production. Nevertheless, Bolivia only has four large-scale solar plants: two in Yunchara and Cobija that produce 5 megawatts each, one in Uyuni that produces 60 megawatts, and its largest in Oruro that produces 100 megawatts.^[83]

Bolivia’s disinclination for large-scale solar is less a representation of a prioritization of an alternative development model but more a result of a lack of foreign investment to finance major solar projects. Nonetheless, in place of large-scale solar have sprung smaller-scale, decentralized solar projects, stemming from both the Bolivian government itself and NGOs. As part of its rural electrification plan, the Bolivian government provides rural houses cut off from the national grid with solar panels and lithium batteries to store solar energy at night.^[84] The renewable rural electrification program, known as Programa Electricidad para Vivir con Dignidad (PEVD), was financed by a combination of public and private funds, including the Nordic Development Fund, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank supplementing funds from the Bolivian government.^[85] The program intended to electrify approximately 180,000 rural households across the country, making it the largest rural electrification program in the region.^[86] The project aimed to make photovoltaic systems affordable to rural populations by financing 60% of the cost of a PV system, while users were expected to pay the remaining 40% over a term of three years.^[87] Nonetheless, despite the program’s moderate success, it remains too dependent on foreign financial aid to be sustainable: trapped in a paradox of eternally “developing,” the post-colonial state is unable to implement renewable energy policies without a financial commitment from instruments of neocolonial finance such as the World Bank. Once foreign funding runs dry, solar electricity provision ceases. Thus, this state-led residential solar development program falls short of the “radical politics of development” promulgated by Hickey and Mohan, as it works within the confines of the post-colonial state and with the support of neocolonial financial institutions, and fails to truly empower the marginalized communities it intends to serve.

 In place of the government, local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play a crucial role in the diffusion of small-scale renewable technologies among the people. Acting as intermediaries between local communities, micro-enterprises, and academics, these organizations disperse solar technologies, build local capacity, and share knowledge to address the dual goal of sustainability and inclusion in the process of community development.

 A Cochabamba-based NGO called Energética tackles rural electrification with a more social-justice-based approach than the Bolivian government. Formed by a group of academics from the Universidad Mayor de San Simón in Cochabamba, the organization focuses not only on the technological components of solar energy distribution, but also on the sociological aspects of sustainable development.^[88] Energética’s mission is to promote energy use “from a perspective of equity, broad solidarity, and proactivity” to achieve sustainable development.^[89] The organization takes a multidisciplinary approach in “understanding that the energy problem influences and depends on the rest of the economic, social, technological, environmental and cultural system” and that individuals must take ownership to ensure the success of the projects in which they participate.^[90] Energética takes a four-pronged approach to rural electrification: (1) developing energy access, (2) sharing knowledge, (3) organizing demands, and (4) strengthening institutions and companies.^[91] Energética works to develop energy access using solar technologies in three realms: energy for the people, which seeks to meet the energy demands of families for lighting, communication and cooking; energy for the community, which develops projects to “strengthen social infrastructure” and services such as rural schools and clinics; and energy for production, which aims to generate additional income for these communities from the production of renewable electricity.^[92]

Energética also has a robust knowledge sharing program, in which it trains locally-based decision-makers, operators, technicians, and users in how to use and fix the solar technologies it deploys throughout rural communities in Bolivia.^[93] This component of Energética’s work is perhaps the most consequential in promoting social change within the communities it services. Rather than simply introducing a foreign technology into a rural community without any knowledge exchange, Energética ensures that its energy project is matched to the needs of the community, and that community members are equipped with the skills they need to take ownership of the technology so that they are not reliant on the organization for continued support and can instead live self-sufficiently. In this way, Energética’s projects mirrors the renewable energy systems built on Native American reservations in the United States: in both cases, indigenous traditions of sharing the fundamental means of subsistence such as land, tools, or public infrastructure are merged with modern technologies that allow indigenous communities to maintain their traditional livelihoods in a landscape defined by neoliberal extractivism. According to anthropologist Ruth Volgger, this interaction between traditional knowledge and academic, entrepreneurial knowledge is called diágolo entre saberes, dialogue between knowledges.^[94] This dialogue “does not reject modern technology, rather it attempts to combine different kinds of knowledge in a non-invasive way to achieve new solutions.^[95]

If a community does need technical assistance, Energética trains a cadre of local technicians that can service the community when necessary. As part of an effort to “guarantee and ensure the technical sustainability of photovoltaic systems in the long term,” Energética collaborated with national solar technician unions and popular education institutes to train “Maintenance Microentrepreneurs” across the country that are equipped to service their communities.^[96] In a publication summarizing this project, Energética interviewed its numerous technicians to understand more clearly the needs of the communities it services. One technician called Pablo reiterated that “it is necessary that the users have access to local maintenance services and suppliers because many of them do not leave their communities.”^[97] By employing these local technicians, Energética preserves community self-sufficiency and their rural livelihoods, rather than making them reliant on federal resources or supplies only available in cities. Another technician named Oscar suggested that “it is necessary to gain the user’s confidence, speak the same language… and enhance the user’s training.”^[98]  Similarly, Energética technician Enrique also recommended to “conduct training workshops for the user” and that “it is more beneficial if they are taught in the same language of the user.”^[99] To share knowledge among indigenous people, Energética provided information and trainings in their native languages, most commonly Quechua or Aymara.

Between 1996-2008, Energética installed 13,983 photovoltaic systems, of which 83.4% were for domestic use, 16.3% were for social use (clinics, schools, churches, adult centers, unions) and 0.3% were for productive use, such as spinning centers, artisanal centers and pumping systems.^[100] Most of these installations were in Cochabamba, Potosí and Oruro, but Energética’s work spans all nine departments across Bolivia.^[101] Until 2012, Energética led a project providing electricity supply to 18,494 people living in rural areas of Potosí and Oruro via photovoltaic systems.^[102] Between 2014-2016, Energética installed communal solar water pumping systems in Oruro, Cochabamba and Potosí to provide potable water for indigenous populations without electricity access.^[103] The project is intended to “improve the quality of life and the health situation” of 16,000 people, “guaranteeing a sustainable and ecological water supply and thus reducing the migration of the countryside” to cities.^[104] It is a perfect example of a community solar project that contributes to the process of decolonization. Energética combats the degradation of traditional livelihoods forced by state-led capitalist development and urbanization by sharing knowledge, encouraging indigenous users to take ownership of their power supply, enhancing local health and preserving indigenous livelihoods.

Energética continues to empower indigenous communities with rural electrification, its most recent project bringing PV and lithium battery solar systems that use LED bulbs to light rural houses. Compared to the government-led rural electrification project, Energética’s projects engage in a process of social change aimed at decolonization via renewable energy technologies. These development projects are truly technologies “of resistance and existence” as stated by Powell that enact “alternative ways for tribes to self-sustain and grow healthy economies, ecologies, cultures, and bodies,” as stated by Powell.^[105] By reclaiming the power-generating processes of nature, indigenous communities in Bolivia and elsewhere can reclaim their social, cultural, economic, and political power.

The Center for Development with Solar Energy (CEDESOL) takes community-based solar development one step closer to a “radical politics of development” than Energética. The Cochabamba-based non-profit’s mission is “to empower the disempowered, guided by the concepts of alternative education, renewable energy, and social justice.”^[106] CEDESOL centers social justice and community empowerment in its work bringing solar cooking systems to rural communities in and around Cochabamba. CEDESOL understands that “real technology transfer is as much about social issues as it is about technology”; it strives to make its technologies sustainable by requiring “community support, an informed understanding of its workings” and technology that “serves a practical purpose.”^[107] When CEDESOL introduces its solar cookers to a community, it is “often met with cultural resistance.” To overcome this reluctant unfamiliarity, CEDESOL couples technology introduction with “intensive, ongoing training and support programs” to ensure that “individuals, families and communities own the technology and have the confidence to modify it to fit local and individual needs.”^[108] Only through community ownership can community and individual empowerment be achieved.

 CEDESOL has distributed 10,000 rocket stoves and solar cookers to rural communities, thus reducing biomass dependency, offsetting more than half a million tons of carbon emissions, and empowering communities as they gain energy independence, financial liberty, and greater freedom (especially among women and children) from duties such as cooking and collecting firewood.^[109] In the long-term, CEDESOL’s solar cookers improve the health of participants, especially women and children, and contribute to both local and global environmental health. CEDESOL’s latest project is provision of solar cookers to eleven schools in Toro Toro, a rural municipality in Potosí founded in the late colonial period by mestizo migrants from Cochabamba. The project has three distinct phases. The first is environmental education–the process of sharing knowledge with participants on environmentally-friendly practices to understand the benefits of solar cookers. This education is crucial to maintaining CEDESOL’s 92% adoption rate by participants.^[110] The second phase is distribution, which not only provides individuals cook-stoves, but also trains users to prevent reversion to familiar, unsustainable cooking methods. The third phase is evaluation, in which CEDESOL encourages participants give feedback on their educational training and on the performance of their cook stoves. This last step allows CEDESOL to “continue to work closely with communities…to fight for carbon reduction, social justice, and access to education in impoverished communities throughout Bolivia.”^[111]

CEDESOL’s community development efforts go one step further than Energética’s, valuing community empowerment and social justice over technological innovation in their projects. Nonetheless, both organizations provide prime examples of how community solar development in Bolivia can be an alternative form of sustainable development that empowers, rather than marginalizes, its rural and indigenous population, amid working to mitigate climate change’s impacts on the global vulnerable communities.

Cracks in the System

The failure of many development projects to foster community autonomy along with climate resiliency is a product of our current society. How can a country that exists within the modern capitalist system resist neoliberal and neocolonial development when those very nations in the Global North, which have defined themselves as “developed,” regard it is as an “underdeveloped” nation? Colonial systems of oppression are deeply rooted in our society, and it is unfair to place the burden of decolonization entirely on previously colonized countries when they already suffer economically, politically, and socioculturally from those very same systems.

However, the small-scale solar development presented in this paper offers a promising solution to this incredibly convoluted conundrum. Community solar development is but one of many clear cracks in the capitalist system, a metaphor employed by John Holloway in his book Crack Capitalism. The more small-scale solar projects that are deployed across the world, simultaneously empowering communities, relocalizing economies, and fostering climate resilience, the more the oppressive capitalist-colonialist economy disintegrates into more sustainable and just alternatives. As Holloway says himself, “the opening of cracks is the opening of a world that presents itself as closed.”^[112] Only by taking a chance on these creative solutions can we prevent our descent into destruction.

About the Author

Celia is a senior at Tufts University from Redding, Connecticut. She is double majoring in International Relations and Environmental Studies with a focus in Sustainability, Policy and Equity. Though her academic interests range from environmental policy and science to history and global affairs, she is primarily interested in how climate change interacts with historical systems of oppression to produce new injustices and is dedicated to fighting these injustices through her activism and work. She spent last spring traveling throughout Vietnam, Morocco and Bolivia to understand the complexities of climate change in some of the world’s most vulnerable landscapes, and hopes to continue this international study of community sustainability post-graduation. 

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Kohl, Benjamin and Linda Farthing, “Material constraints to popular imaginaries: The extractive economy and resource nationalism in Bolivia” Political Geography 31, 2012: 225-235

Kurmanaev, Anatoly. “Evo Morales and Bolivia: What We Know About the President’s Resignation,” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/12/world/americas/evo-morales-resignation-bolivia-facts.html (November 12, 2019)

Mies, Maria. “Housewifisation—Globalisation—Subsistence Perspective,” in Beyond Marx, eds. M. Van der Linden and K. H. Roth. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Publishers, 2014: 209-237

Mitlin, Diana, Sam Hickey, and Anthony Bebbington, “Reclaiming Development? NGOs and the Challenge of Alternatives” World Development 35 no.10, 2007: 1699-1720

Mounk, Yascha. “Evo Morales Finally Went Too Far for Bolivia,” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/evo-morales-finally-went-too-far-bolivia/601741/ (November 11, 2019)

Nkrumah, Kwame. Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. London, UK: Panaf Books, 1970.

“Our Mission,” CEDESOL, http://cedesol.org/ourmission/

Pansera, Mario. “Renewable energy for rural areas in Bolivia.” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 16, no.9, 2012: 6694-6704.

Powell, Dana E.”Technologies of Existence: The indigenous environmental justice movement” Society for International Development, 49, no.3, 2006: 125-132

Romero, Simon. “Where is the Amazon Rainforest Vanishing? Not Just in Brazil,” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/world/americas/amazon-rainforest.html (August 30, 2019)

 “Rural electrification with renewable energy in Bolivia,” Nordic Development Fund, https://www.ndf.fi/news/rural-electrification-renewable-energy-bolivia, (September 7, 2012)

Svampa, Maristella. “Resource Extractivism and Alternatives: Latin American Perspectives on Development,” Journal of Development Studies, 28, January 2012: 117-143

Vidal, John.“Bolivia enshrines natural world’s rights with equal status for Mother Earth.” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/10/bolivia-enshrines-natural-worlds-rights (April 10, 2011).

Webber, Jeffrey R. “Carlos Mesa, Evo Morales, and a Divided Bolivia (2003-2005),” Latin American Perspectives, 37, no.3, July 2010: 51-70

Endnotes

^[1] “Indigenous People in Bolivia.” IWGIA, https://www.iwgia.org/en/bolivia

^[2] Robert Albro, “Evo Morales’s Chaotic Departure Won’t Define His Legacy.” Foreign Policy, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/22/evo-morales-departure-bolivia-indigenous-legacy/ (November 22, 2019).

^[3] John Vidal, “Bolivia enshrines natural world’s rights with equal status for Mother Earth.” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/10/bolivia-enshrines-natural-worlds-rights (April 10, 2011).

^[4] Jessica Camille Aguirre and Elizabeth Sonia Cooper, “Evo Morales, Climate Change, and the Paradoxes of a Social-Movement Presidency,” Latin American Perspectives 37, no.4 (July 2010): 240

^[5] Aguirre and Cooper, “Evo Morales, Climate Change, and the Paradoxes of a Social-Movement Presidency,”  240-1

^[6] Ibid, 240

^[7] Ibid, 241

^[8] Ibid 241

^[9] Jeffery R. Webber, “Carlos Mesa, Evo Morales, and a Divided Bolivia (2003-2005),” Latin American Perspectives, 37, no.3 (July 2010): 67

^[10] Diego Andreucci and Isabella M. Radhuber, “Limits to ‘counter-neoliberal’ reform: Mining expansion and the marginalization of post-extractivist forces in Evo Morales’s Bolivia,” Geoforum 84 (2017): 280

^[11] Andreucci and Radhuber, “Limits to ‘counter-neoliberal’ reform: Mining expansion and the marginalization of post-extractivist forces in Evo Morales’s Bolivia,” 282

^[12] Arturo Escobar, “The Problematization of Poverty: The Tale of Three Worlds and Development” in Encountering Development: The Making and the Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 52

^[13] Dan Collyns, “Bolivia approves highway through Amazon biodiversity hotspot,” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/15/bolivia-approves-highway-in-amazon-biodiversity-hotspot-as-big-as-jamaica (August 15, 2017)

^[14] Emily Achtenberg, “Why is Evo Morales Reviving Bolivia’s Controversial TIPNIS Road?” NACLA, https://nacla.org/blog/2017/08/22/why-evo-morales-reviving-bolivia%E2%80%99s-controversial-tipnis-road (August 21, 2015)

^[15] Collyns, “Bolivia approves highway through Amazon biodiversity hotspot.”

^[16] Achtenberg, “Why is Evo Morales Reviving Bolivia’s Controversial TIPNIS Road?”

^[17] Ibid

^[18] Ibid

^[19] Ibid

^[20] Andreucci and Radhuber, 281

^[21] Ibid, 282

^[22] Ibid, 284

^[23] Ibid, 284

^[24] Benjamin Kohl and Linda Farthing, “Material constraints to popular imaginaries: The extractive economy and resource nationalism in Bolivia” Political Geography 31 (2012): 225

^[25] Oliver Balch, “How a populist president helped Bolivia’s poor— but built himself a palace,” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/07/how-a-populist-president-helped-bolivias-poor-but-built-himself-a-palace (March 7, 2019)

^[26] Benjamin Kohl and Linda Farthing, “Material constraints to popular imaginaries: The extractive economy and resource nationalism in Bolivia,” 226

^[27] Ibid

^[28] Kohl and Farthing, 230

^[29] Maristella Svampa, “Resource Extractivism and Alternatives: Latin American Perspectives on Development,” Journal of Development Studies, 28 (January 2012): 126

^[30] Svampa, “Resource Extractivism and Alternatives: Latin American Perspectives on Development,” 126

^[31] Kohl and Farthing, 230

^[32] Ibid, 231

^[33] Andreucci and Radhuber, 285

^[34] Kohl and Farthing, 231

^[35] Ibid

^[36] Ibid

^[37] Miriam Telma Jemio, “Bolivia’s forest fires and the rise of beef exports,” Diálogo Chino, https://dialogochino.net/29896-bolivias-forest-fires-and-the-rise-of-beef-exports/ (September 4, 2019)

^[38] Jemio, “Bolivia’s forest fires and the rise of beef exports”

^[39] Ibid

^[40] Paola Flores, “Evo Morales not trending among Bolivia’s youth ahead of vote,” The Associated Press, https://apnews.com/3a675c8af8584c2dba29c7e3f4f3a79b (October 7, 2019)

^[41] Jane Dalton, “Amazon fires: Bolsonaro rages at ‘colonial’ G7 leaders over $16m aid deal to fight Brazil blazes,” The Independent, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/amazon-fires-bolsonaro-brazil-g7-summit-aid-deal-a9079586.html (August 26, 2019)

^[42] Jemio, “Bolivia’s forest fires and the rise of beef exports”

^[43] Ibid

^[44] Anatoly Kurmanaev, “Evo Morales and Bolivia: What We Know About the President’s Resignation,” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/12/world/americas/evo-morales-resignation-bolivia-facts.html (November 12, 2019)

^[45] Yascha Mounk, “Evo Morales Finally Went Too Far for Bolivia,” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/evo-morales-finally-went-too-far-bolivia/601741/ (November 11, 2019)

^[46] Simon Romero, “Where is the Amazon Rainforest Vanishing? Not Just in Brazil,” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/world/americas/amazon-rainforest.html (August 30, 2019)

^[47] Svampa, 117

^[48] Ibid, 118

^[49] Ibid, 119

^[50] Henry Bernstein, “Colonialism, Capitalism, Development,” in Poverty and Development into the 21st Century, eds. Tim Allen and Alan Thomas (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000): 247

^[51] Bernstein, “Colonialism, Capitalism, Development,” 265

^[52] Ibid, 266

^[53] Escobar, “The Problematization of Poverty: The Tale of Three Worlds and Development,” 23

^[54] Bernstein, 266

^[55] Escobar, 23-4

^[56] Bernstein, 267

^[57] Escobar, 26

^[58] Ibid, 38

^[59] Ibid, 43

^[60] Ibid, 49

^[61] Bernstein, 269

^[62] Escobar, 26

^[63] Kwame Nkrumah, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (London, UK: Panaf Books, 1970), ix

^[64] Nkrumah, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, xiii

^[65] Ibid, xv

^[66] Ibid

^[67] Escobar, 53

^[68] Sam Hickey and Giles Mohan, Relocating participation within a radical politics of development: citizenship and critical modernism (Manchester, UK: University of Manchester, 2003), 1

^[69] Sam Hickey and Giles Mohan, Relocating participation within a radical politics of development: citizenship and critical modernism, 20

^[70] Diana Mitlin, Sam Hickey, and Anthony Bebbington, “Reclaiming Development? NGOs and the Challenge of Alternatives” World Development 35 no.10 (2007): 1705

^[71] Dana E. Powell, “Technologies of Existence: The indigenous environmental justice movement” Society for International Development, 49, no.3 (2006): 125

^[72] Dana E. Powell, “Technologies of Existence: The indigenous environmental justice movement,” 130

^[73] Powell, 128

^[74] Ibid, 129

^[75] Ibid

^[76] Ibid, 130

^[77] Ibid

^[78] Maria Mies, “Housewifisation—Globalisation—Subsistence Perspective,” in Beyond Marx, eds. M. Van der Linden and K. H. Roth (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Publishers, 2014): 231

^[79] Maria Mies, “Housewifisation—Globalisation—Subsistence Perspective,” 236

^[80] Ibid, 232

^[81] Renan Orellana de la Fuente, “Energy in Bolivia,” Lecture, Centro de Estudios Superiores Universitarios,  Cochabamba, Bolivia  (April 26, 2019)

^[82] Miguel Fernandez, “Renewable Energy in Bolivia,” Cochabamba, Lecture, Centro de Estudios Superiores Universitarios, Cochabamba, Bolivia (April 26, 2019)

^[83] “Bolivia opens its largest solar farm,” Power-Technology,https://www.power-technology.com/news/bolivia-opens-largest-solar-farm/, (September 10, 2018)

^[84] Renan Orellana de la Fuente, “Energy in Bolivia,”

^[85] “Rural electrification with renewable energy in Bolivia,” Nordic Development Fund, https://www.ndf.fi/news/rural-electrification-renewable-energy-bolivia, (September 7, 2012)

^[86] Mario Pansera, “Renewable energy for rural areas in Bolivia.” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 16, no.9 (2012): 669

^[87] Pansera, “Renewable energy for rural areas in Bolivia,” 6699

^[88] Ibid, 6700-1

^[89] “Energy for Development” Energética, http://www.energetica.org.bo/energetica/quienessomos.asp

^[90] “Methodology and Work Areas,” Energética, http://www.energetica.org.bo/energetica/areastrabajo.asp

^[91] Ibid

^[92] Ibid

^[93] Ibid

^[94] Pansera, 6702

^[95] Ibid

^[96] Energética, “Micro Empresas Solares: Número 2,” (March 2010): 3

^[97] “Micro Empresas Solares: Número 2,” 3

^[98] Ibid, 8

^[99] Ibid, 11

^[100] Energética, “Micro Empresas Solares: Número 1,” (March 2009): 1

^[101] “Micro Empresas Solares: Número 1,” 1

^[102] “Decentralized Infrastructure for Rural Transformation,” Energética, http://www.energetica.org.bo/energetica/proyectosd.asp?tp=17

^[103] “Potable Water Photovoltaic Pumping in Oruro,” Energética, http://www.energetica.org.bo/energetica/proyectosd.asp?tp=48

^[104] Ibid

^[105] Powel, 130

^[106] “Our Mission,” CEDESOL, http://cedesol.org/ourmission/

^[107] “Our Mission,” CEDESOL

^[108]  Ibid

^[109] “Current Project,” CEDESOL, http://cedesol.org/overview/

^[110] “Current Project,” CEDESOL

^[111] Ibid

^[112] John Holloway, Crack Capitalism. (London, UK: Pluto Press, 2010): 5

In October 1962, the Soviet Union began to install long-range, nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba – an unprecedented expansion of Soviet reach.[1] President Kennedy, seeking a firm yet measured response, decided shortly thereafter to impose a naval blockade on the region, demanding a swift withdrawal of Soviet forces.[2] With neither country willing to capitulate to the other, tensions mounted, pushing both parties to the brink of internecine nuclear warfare, an inadmissible outcome facilitating a consequent joint de-escalation effort.[3] This international game of chicken is formalized in game theory as “brinkmanship:” a strategy whereby two opposing parties continuously heighten the stakes of conflict in order to gain the upper hand while pre-empting potentially calamitous outcomes – or as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles explained in 1956, “the ability to get to the verge without getting into the war.”[4],[5] Around half a century after the Missile Scare of 1962, the Trump Administration is employing an analogous tactic of brinkmanship to the war against climate change, establishing a Presidential Committee on Climate Security to “keep challenging the Pentagon . . . until it gets an answer it likes,” withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, and otherwise gutting Obama-era climate policies in an obstinate game of climatic gambling – delaying concrete action until the need for de-escalation (or in this case, decarbonization) can simply no longer be ignored.[6] However, this approach is fundamentally flawed.

Though environmental crises have often proven effective in bringing to light the adverse impacts of – and catalyzing subsequent action on – anthropogenic climate change, such crises were typically of a highly visible nature: the Santa Barbara oil-spill of 1969 led to the first Earth-Day protests, and the pesticide epidemic of the 1960s contributed to the establishment of the EPA.[7],[8]  In contrast, climate change is a somewhat less obvious phenomenon than oil in oceans or pesticides in produce, and it is often difficult for a mainstream audience to internalize the implications of a warming climate as spelled out in academic publications employing complex scientific techniques. Moreover, the climate changes in a non-linear fashion – e.g. warming global conditions facilitate permafrost thawing, which may contribute to an abrupt, widespread release of CO2 into the atmosphere – meaning that environmental harm can increase at a sudden and exponential rate after certain thresholds are exceeded.[9] In other words, these elements of non-linearity and (in)visibility obscure the true magnitude of climate crises and problematize the application of brinkmanship tactics to climate policy, as it is difficult to “get to the verge” if the cliff cannot be seen and objects are, in reality, much closer than they appear.

Furthermore, climate crises are different than missile crises as the latter can be resolved with few residual ramifications: missiles can be dismantled, blockades can be dismissed, and diplomacy can be restored. However, climate crises strain the environment in adverse and enduring ways. For instance, the chlorofluorocarbon crisis of the 1970s resulted in a nearly irreversible void in the ozone layer,^[10] and the recent increase in the incidence of weather extremes have resulted in the destruction of millions of habitats, eliminated carbon sinks, and contributed to consistently elevated levels of greenhouse gas emissions.^[11] As Naomi Oreskes summarizes in Merchants of Doubt, “Climate change is happening. It’s under way, and it’s not reversible.”[12] This element of permanence – of lasting effects – renders climate change a difficult issue to push to the brink, as it may not be feasible to walk back from the edge.

To tackle climate change with the frame of brinkmanship is to recklessly assume an enormous amount of risk: as Michael Klare writes in The Nation, rising global temperatures are “expected to diminish crop yields . . . adding to the desperation of farmers and very likely resulting in widespread ethnic strife and population displacement” and “as food and water supplies dwindle and governments come under ever-increasing pressure to meet the vital needs of their populations, disputes over critical resources are likely to become more heated and violent.”[13] Developments of this nature – Alfred McCoy predicts in “What Does it Take to Destroy a World Order” – are poised to destabilize communities on a national scale, which could further cause “the international cooperation that lay at the heart of Washington’s world order for the past 90 years [to] simply wither.”[14] However, the assumption of these risks is wholly unnecessary and avoidable. At a recent global security conference in Munich, top European and United Nations officials expressed concern over climate change’s role as a “threat multiplier” that could exacerbate geopolitical conflicts abroad – one of many indications that there exists tangible support for proactive, rather than reactive, coordinated global climate action.[15] Moreover, the 26 corporations comprising the U.S. Climate Action Partnership’s 2007-2010 lobbying effort for a federal cap and trade system, and the 58 senior military leaders citing climate change as a significant threat to national security in a recent open letter, suggests similar sentiments of support amongst both the public and private sectors.[16]

Still, mainstream politics eschews the realities of climate change, kicking the can down the road and in some instances, dismissing outright the prevailing scientific consensus of a warming climate. However, pushing the Earth to the brink of its planetary boundaries – holding out for absolute consensus (a virtual impossibility in science) or the manifestation of regular, worsening environmental crises – is negligence on an unfathomable scale and a dangerous game of brinkmanship that could well backfire.

Bibliography

Gilbert, Emily. “The militarization of climate change.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 11.1 (2012): 1-14.

Keller, Jared. “The White House Will Keep Challenging the Pentagon on the Threat of Climate Change Until It Gets an Answer It Likes,” Task & Purpose, February 20, 2019. https://taskandpurpose.com/trump-climate-change-national-security-panel.

Klare, Michael. “How Rising Temperatures Increase the Likelihood of Nuclear War,” The Nation (January 13, 2020), https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/nuclear-defense-climate-change/.

Kozloff, Max. “American painting during the Cold War.” Artforum 11.9 (1973): 43-54.

Lewis, Jack. “The birth of EPA.” EPA J. 11 (1985): 6.

Lobel, Nathan. “Unraveling the U.S. Climate Action Plan: Explaining Corporate Participation in a Pro-Regulatory Advocacy Coalition,” Senior Essay, Yale Department of Political Science, December 9, 2016.

McCoy, Alfred. “What Does It Take to Destroy a World Order,” Salon (March 3, 2019), https://www.salon.com/2019/03/03/what-does-it-take-to-destroy-a-world-order_partner/

McNeill, John Robert, and Peter Engelke. The Great Acceleration. Harvard University Press, 2016.

Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2011.

Paul Newman et al, “2018 Ozone Hole is a Reminder of what Almost was,” NASA: November 2, 2018. https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13103.

Powell, Robert. “Nuclear brinkmanship with two-sided incomplete information.” American Political Science Review82.1 (1988): 155-178.

Rial, José A., et al. “Nonlinearities, feedbacks and critical thresholds within the Earth’s climate system.” Climatic change65.1-2 (2004): 11-38.

Weldes, Jutta. Constructing national interests: The United States and the Cuban missile crisis. University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Wheeling, Kate and Max Ufberg, “‘The Ocean is Boiling:’ The Complete Oral History of the Santa Barbara Oil Spill,” Pacific Standard, November 7, 2018. https://psmag.com/news/the-ocean-is-boiling-the-complete-oral-history-of-the-1969-santa-barbara-oil-spill.

Endnotes

[1] Weldes, Jutta. Constructing national interests: The United States and the Cuban missile crisis. University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

[2] Weldes, 1999.

[3] Weldes, 1999.

[4] Powell, Robert. “Nuclear brinkmanship with two-sided incomplete information.” American Political Science Review 82.1 (1988): 155-178.

[5] Kozloff, Max. “American painting during the Cold War.” Artforum 11.9 (1973): 43-54.

[6] Jared Keller, “The White House Will Keep Challenging the Pentagon on the Threat of Climate Change Until It Gets an Answer It Likes,” Task & Purpose, February 20, 2019. https://taskandpurpose.com/trump-climate-change-national-security-panel

[7] Wheeling, Kate and Max Ufberg, “‘The Ocean is Boiling:’ The Complete Oral History of the Santa Barbara Oil Spill,” Pacific Standard, November 7, 2018. https://psmag.com/news/the-ocean-is-boiling-the-complete-oral-history-of-the-1969-santa-barbara-oil-spill.

[8] Lewis, Jack. “The birth of EPA.” EPA J. 11 (1985): 6.

[9] Rial, José A., et al. “Nonlinearities, feedbacks and critical thresholds within the Earth’s climate system.” Climatic change 65.1-2 (2004): 11-38.

[10] Paul Newman et al, “2018 Ozone Hole is a Reminder of what Almost was,” NASA: November 2, 2018. https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13103

[11] McNeill, John Robert, and Peter Engelke. The Great Acceleration. Harvard University Press, 2016.

[12] Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2011.

[13] Michael Klare, “How Rising Temperatures Increase the Likelihood of Nuclear War,” The Nation (January 13, 2020), https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/nuclear-defense-climate-change/.

[14] Alfred W. McCoy, “What Does It Take to Destroy a World Order,” Salon (March 3, 2019), https://www.salon.com/2019/03/03/what-does-it-take-to-destroy-a-world-order_partner/

[15] Gilbert, Emily. “The militarization of climate change.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 11.1 (2012): 1-14.

[16] Nathan Lobel, “Unraveling the U.S. Climate Action Plan: Explaining Corporate Participation in a Pro-Regulatory Advocacy Coalition,” Senior Essay, Yale Department of Political Science, December 9, 2016.

South and Central Asia Desk

Written by: Minahil Nawaz, Timothy Dwight College

At 10 AM on 30th October 2019, the Air Quality Index (AQI) in Lahore, Pakistan reached 484. According to Amnesty International, the threshold that determines “hazardous” levels of air quality is 300, when people are asked to “avoid all physical activity outdoors.” Despite this warning, business continued as usual in the city of 11 million people. 

On 7th November 2019 though, when the Air Quality Index increased to 551, the provincial government was forced to announce the closure of all schools in Lahore. A thick blag smog engulfed the region as driving any kind of vehicle became impossible and the city became virtually unbreathable. The situation had escalated to a severe public health crisis. 

For most of the year, levels of air quality in Pakistan’s most populous province of Punjab were rated “near unhealthy” and “very unhealthy,” according to reports by US Consulate air quality monitors and crowdsourced data from the Pakistan Air Quality Initiative (PAQI). But from October onwards, the city of Lahore has been experiencing “smog season”: air quality has reached hazardous levels and has been worsened by poor fuel quality, uncontrolled emissions and agricultural stubble burning as farmers clear their fields. Furthermore, with the results of climate change, warmer temperatures have caused the resulting smog to hover over the region for months. 

In particular, low-income workers such as laborers, construction workers, and marginalized groups are most vulnerable to the health-related impact of air pollution, as the nature of their work leads them to be exposed to unhealthy air quality throughout the day. These are also the Lahoris with little access to appropriate health care, or the ability to afford such health care. 135,000 deaths are attributed to air pollution each year, making it the leading cause of sickness in Pakistan and reducing life expectancy by 60 months. 

In the realm of politics, blame for this air quality continues to be shifted to India. Most recently, according to a tweet by Pakistan’s Minister of State for Climate Change, Zartaj Gul Wazir, crop burning in India was the main source of smog in Lahore. Meanwhile, a BJP politician in India, Vineet Agarwal Sharda, appeared to blame both Pakistan and China for air pollution in India: “There’s a possibility that poisonous air could have been released by a neighboring country.”

As pointed out by Rimmel Mohydin, South Asia Campaigner at Amnesty International, though: “There is something very wrong when the air becomes so toxic that you cannot breathe without hurting yourself. The government can no longer afford to waste time while people are choking to death.”

Written by Putt Punyagupta

On December 22, a tumultuous series of waves pummelled coastal settlements on the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Java, killing nearly 300 and injury upwards of 1,000.

It was spurred by the eruption of the volcano Anak Krakatau — “child of Krakatoa” in Bahasa Indonesia — a subsidiary volcano formed from a caldera following the cataclysmic eruption of 1883. The volcano hadbecome increasingly active over the past few months.

Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, the spokesman of the National Disaster Management Agency of Indonesia,, warned of a possible additional tsunami due to the continued eruptions of Anak Krakatau, urging people in coastal settlements not to carry out activities on the beach and to stay away from the coast until further notice is given.

The unconventional nature of this tsunami contributed to its surprise factor. It struck at 21:30 local time, and prior to the arrival waves, very few warning signs could be discerned. The sea water did not drastically recede as it would with an earthquake tsunami. Moreover, the activity of Anak Krakatau has often been described by locals as continuous but low-scale; thus, few designated the volcano as a potential cause for a tsunami.

The disaster called into question the efficacy of Indonesia’s tsunami warning systems. It was revealed by Nugroho that Indonesia’s early warning system is set to monitor earthquakes rather than undersea landslides and volcanic eruptions, both of which can cause deadly waves of the same magnitude. However, the institution of such a system was recognized as necessary due to thirteen percent of the world’s volcanoes being situated in Indonesia. A lack of funds and degradation of mechanisms involved also meant that any warning system had been defunct since 2012.

The tsunami that struck of the coast of Sulawesi earlier this year in September, as well as the calamitous boxing day tsunami of December 2004 that killed over 228,000 in 13 different countries were both spurred by earthquakes. Waves precipitated by volcanic debris as was the case in this recent tsunami are not as frequent.

Image Caption: Deena Mousa’s (‘20) Shamsina brings clean energy security to Cairo families

Since 2015, Deena Mousa (JE ‘20) has served as the founder and head of Shamsina, a solar energy start-up operating in Egypt.

Shamsina looks to provide solar-powered water heaters to Egyptian communities with insufficient or limited access to alternative power sources.[1]

Mousa started the company along with her sister after observing that many residents of Cairo lacked access to water heaters. This prompted the use of hazardous methods to heat water such as lighting garbage pots on fire or employing kerosene lamps.

In an interview with YRIS, Mousa described the serious public health issues caused by these practices, stating, “The health repercussions of inhaling kerosene fumes are similar to those caused by smoking two packs of cigarettes. Not to mention burns — local public hospitals report numerous cases, and even deaths, caused by kerosene lamps.”[2]

The Mousa sisters envision Shamsina as a company that can not only help disseminate water heaters but also generate sustainable economic development by employing workers from low-income communities to build these heaters and utilizing locally sourced materials so as to generate a productive cycle of investment directly in underserved areas. This model reflects a growing trend in Egypt towards the adoption of new energy sources with the added dimension of social entrepreneurship calling.

Mousa’s work comes at a turning point for the renewable energy sector in Egypt. President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi has stated his intention to make renewable energy sources comprise 20 percent of Egypt’s energy sector by 2020, signaling interest in finding alternatives to the country’s traditionally oil-dominated energy landscape.[3]

To date, the government subsidies meant to stimulate investment in renewables mainly benefit large firms in the form of feed-in tariffs, which pay firms a value proportionate to the amount of energy they contribute to the nation. Nevertheless, major investors remain largely hesitant to diversify from the dominant petroleum industry, which creates significant opportunities for younger companies such as Shamsina to fill in the gaps in coverage that continue to plague many Egyptian communities.[4]

Mousa reported a greater diversity of enterprises, “from electric bikes to thermally-heated chicken farms,” which employ renewable energy to help the country shift towards a more environmentally friendly energy footprint.[5] Shamsina distinguishes itself from oil corporations that, in spite of the high rents they generate, tend to employ proportionally fewer individuals and rarely utilize labor from nearby communities.

Currently, Shamsina is looking to expand its model to more communities and regions around Egypt. In the short run, Mousa identified refugee camps as a priority, as these locations often face issues securing access to heating in the winter, and employ many of the same hazardous techniques observed in Cairo, with medical centers in camps reporting cases of severe burns among residents.[6] While this remains a formidable challenge, Shamsina is well poised to tackle it.

The company was recently recognized as a top 100 startup by the International Finance Corporation and World Economic Forum, an opportunity that has helped Shamsina  “insert concepts of decentralized, bottom-up, and clean approaches to energy provision into an otherwise quite traditional conversation,” according to Mousa.[7]

Additionally, greater international recognition has connected Shamsina to a wider array of partners interested in helping to further its mission and contribute to the global movement towards renewable energy.

Endnotes

[1] “Shamsina.” F6S. Accessed July 27, 2018. https://www.f6s.com/shamsina.

[2] “Global Health Studies at Yale College.” Deena Mousa | Global Health Studies at Yale College. Accessed July 27, 2018. https://globalhealthstudies.yale.edu/global-health-scholars-program/projects/current/deena-mousa., Mousa, Deena. “Interview with Deena Mousa.” E-mail interview by author. August 26, 2018.

[3] Evans, Scarlett. “Egypt Opens New Power Stations in Development Drive.” Power Technology. July 25, 2018. Accessed July 27, 2018. https://www.power-technology.com/news/egypt-opens-new-power-stations/.

[4] Williamson, Rachel. “Sun Shines on Egypt’s Solar Startups.” Wamda. April 30, 2015. Accessed July 27, 2018. https://www.wamda.com/memakersge/2015/04/sun-shines-on-egypt-solar-startups.

[5] Mousa, Deena. “Interview with Deena Mousa.” E-mail interview by author. August 26, 2018.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

This essay first appeared in the Acheson Prize 2018 Issue of the Yale Review of International Studies.

Abstract

As global climate change accelerates sea ice loss in the Arctic Circle and Antarctica while the size of the human population continues to increase, the natural living resources that are richly distributed in these regions are becoming increasingly vulnerable to anthropogenic threats. While the marine biodiversity of Antarctica is largely protected by the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, the Arctic Circle lacks strong legislation that will protect its marine biodiversity from the habitat loss and disruption that will be caused by continued commercial fishing, extraction of increasingly accessible oil and mineral deposits, and use of the Arctic Ocean as a shipping lane. In order to protect the marine biodiversity of the Arctic Ocean, strong international environmental law must be implemented on the basis of scientific ecosystem research. This paper will review the Convention on the Conservation of the Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) and make suggestions for multilateral cooperation in the Arctic Circle based on the principles and procedures set forth by CCAMLR. Additionally, this paper will analyze the ways in which the Arctic Council can facilitate bilateral agreements to begin to protect important areas of biodiversity. It is critical to the future of marine biodiversity in the Arctic that nations utilizing, or planning to utilize, the Arctic Ocean for fishing, shipping, drilling, mining, tourism, or any other use, work together to determine an effective way to minimize biodiversity loss in this region.

Introduction and Background

Due to global climate change, temperatures in the Arctic are increasing more than in any other region on the planet, resulting in glacial retreat and sea ice loss at alarming rates. It has been predicted that a planetary temperature increase of 2°C will cause between a 2.8°C and 7.8°C increase in average temperatures in the Arctic.^[1] The warming of the Arctic is affecting and will continue to affect all biodiversity in the Arctic Circle in many ways. Not only is the warming changing the physical composition of Arctic ecosystems, but it is also providing the opportunity for increased natural resource exploitation and disturbance in the Arctic environment. Due to the increased accessibility of the Arctic Ocean due to the rapid melting of polar sea ice, the Arctic Ocean now provides 10% of the global fish catch, 10% of global oil extraction, and 25% of global gas extraction.^[2] Additionally, as sea ice continues to melt, global shipping activities will likely increase through the Arctic Ocean. These activities – fishing, mining, drilling, and shipping – all have negative consequences for Arctic biodiversity. However, international law has the potential to address these anthropogenic ecosystem stressors and protect Arctic marine ecosystems and biodiversity.

International law concerning the Arctic can be negotiated under the guidance Arctic Council, which is the intergovernmental forum for negotiation and collaboration between the eight Arctic States. In order to protect Arctic biodiversity, the Arctic Council must facilitate a series of multilateral and bilateral treaties to protect biologically significant areas, encourage collaborative scientific research, and prevent the harm to biodiversity that is caused by natural resource exploitation. In the Antarctic, the Commission on the Conservation of Arctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) protects marine biodiversity. CCAMLR is a multilateral treaty between twenty-four states. It sets forth guidelines and protocols to protect Antarctic marine living resources such as restrictions on fishing for endangered species, protocol for creating marine protected areas in ecologically important habitats, and restrictions on fishing seasons and fishing types. Many of these concepts could be implemented in the Arctic Circle in order to conserve and protect the marine living resources in the area. However, further cooperative scientific research is needed to determine the vulnerable species and resilient areas of Arctic ecosystems and the most effective procedures to protect important species and biologically productive areas within the Arctic.

This paper will explore the state of biodiversity protection in the Arctic and will suggest further bilateral and multilateral agreements. The principles for these agreements can build upon well-known principles of environmental law such as Principle 21 of the Stockholm Declaration, which states that, though nations have the right to cause exploit their own natural resources, they should not pursue activities that will cause environmental harm to areas of other sovereign states. Additionally, agreements can consider the precautionary principle and the polluter pays principle in creating legal frameworks to address biodiversity concerns in the Arctic.

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are currently the main form of marine biodiversity protection in the Arctic. Marine Protected Areas are defined as: “A clearly defined geographical space recognized, dedicated, and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values.”^[3] While MPAs are important for ecosystem resilience and to ensure the protection of critical and unique ecosystems, they are not extremely effective as a singular mode of protection.^[4] This is because marine biodiversity is often migratory and highly impacted by the environmental health of neighboring marine areas. Though MPAs are an important part of an Arctic marine protection framework, in order to be most effective the creation of MPAs must be accompanied by multilateral and bilateral agreements between Arctic States to further the goals of marine ecosystem protection and conservation throughout the entire Arctic marine environment.

The Arctic Council

The key legal framework for implementing biodiversity protection in the Arctic is the Arctic Council. The Arctic Council is an intergovernmental forum that was created on September 19, 1996 in order to promote coordination and cooperation of the Arctic States – Canada, the United States, Denmark, Sweden, the Russian Federation, Iceland, Norway, and Finland. The Arctic Council also encourages cooperation between the Arctic States and indigenous native Arctic communities and six indigenous peoples’ organizations are permanent participants within the Arctic Council. The Arctic Council provides a framework for the eight Arctic States and indigenous communities to discuss, negotiate, and produce necessary agreements to protect the well being of Arctic inhabitants, ecosystems, and visitors. Recently, the Arctic Council has facilitated two pan-Arctic multilateral agreements involving all eight Arctic States.

The Arctic Council is guided by the regulations set forth by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which recognizes the rights of nations to exploit the resources in their economic zones, which are defined as the zones within 200 nautical miles from their coastal baseline. Every nation that is a permanent participant of the Arctic Council, except the United States, is a contracting party of UNCLOS. Though the United States has not ratified UNCLOS, the National Strategy for the Arctic Region, a document released by the White House in 2009, affirms the intentions of the United States to abide by the guidelines set forth by UNCLOS regarding treaty negotiations within the Arctic. The document states, “While the United States is not currently a party to the [UNCLOS] Convention, we will continue to support and observe principles of established customary international law reflected in the Convention.”^[5]

In the coming years, the Arctic Council has the potential to become an important international organization. Two multilateral treaties were negotiated and signed by all eight Arctic States in 2011 and 2013, setting the stage for the Arctic Council to continue to facilitate and encourage further international agreements pertaining to the Arctic. Several governments have recognized this growing possibility. For example, the Government of Finland’s 2013 Strategy for the Arctic reads, “The Arctic Council’s institutional role has been growing following the establishment of a permanent secretariat, the conclusion of binding international agreements and the extension of the Council’s agenda. Finland supports the continuation of this development and the recognition of the Arctic Council as a treaty-based international organisation.”^[6] As the Arctic Council continues to develop its role as a facilitator of international agreements, the creation of multilateral and bilateral marine biodiversity treaties in the Arctic will become increasingly feasible.

Protecting and conserving biodiversity is a key issue for the Arctic Council. Two of the Arctic Council’s working groups, the Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF) group and the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP) group, produce relevant research, reports, and recommendations pertaining to the preservation and conservation of the Arctic biodiversity. Additionally, the importance of conserving biodiversity is acknowledged in the Ottawa Declaration, the treaty which established the Arctic Council and was ratified in 1996, reads: “[We are] affirming… our commitment to the protection of the Arctic environment, including the health of Arctic ecosystems… [and] biodiversity in the Arctic region and conservation and sustainable use of natural resources.”^[7]

Anthropogenic Threats to Arctic Biodiversity

All Arctic States, with the exception of the United States, have ratified the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity which recognizes the importance of conserving and protecting global biodiversity because of its importance for “maintaining the life systems of the biosphere” as well as for its cultural, genetic, scientific, social, and ecological value.^[8] The Arctic Circle is home to 21,000 known species.^[9] Several of these species are charismatic megafauna, such as polar bears, walruses, seals, narwhals, and beluga whales. The Arctic Ocean also has the world’s widest continental shelf, the Siberian shelf, which is a biological hotspot and an important area for all Arctic ecosystems.

Arctic biodiversity is important not only for the reasons stated in the Convention on Biological Diversity, but also because Arctic marine living resources play a crucial role in the lives of indigenous Arctic communities. There are about four million people living in the circumpolar north, and more than 500,000 of these people live in indigenous Arctic communities.^[10] These communities rely on the natural living resources of the Arctic Ocean for subsistence, and the destruction and contamination of Arctic biodiversity can adversely affect the health and the survival of these communities.

For thousands of years, small indigenous communities have fished and hunted in the Arctic Ocean in order to provide sustenance for their populations. However, in the past 80 years, climate change has increased the ease of access to the Arctic Ocean for commercial fishing boats and, as a result, commercial fishing in the Arctic has been steadily increasing. Commercial fishing is a significant stressor on marine biodiversity and marine ecosystems. Though this recent increase in commercial fishing activities has not been shown to be detrimental for fish populations in the Arctic Ocean yet, it has further endangered vulnerable bird and mammal populations and harmed unique and biologically productive cold-water coral reefs. Large fishing nets and other commercial fishing techniques contribute to bycatch of vulnerable bird and mammal species. This unnecessary mortality can cause irreparable harm to populations of endangered species, especially birds.^[11]

In the past, commercial fishing has only occurred in coastal areas and bays of the Arctic Ocean, however as deglaciation continues, the high Arctic Ocean may become accessible for large-scale commercial fishing operations as well. At the moment, there is no fishing in the high Arctic Ocean because, in 2015, five Arctic States, Canada, the Kingdom of Denmark, the Kingdom of Norway, the Russian Federation, and the United States of America, signed a voluntary declaration, in which they agreed to withhold from commercial fishing in the international waters of the Central Arctic Ocean.^[12] Right now, this area is almost completely covered by ice, but it likely will not be in the vert near future because of the rapid rate of glacial ice melt in the Arctic. However, this agreement is not legally binding and does not account for other nations that may have commercial fishing interests in this area as it becomes increasingly accessible, such as China, Japan, Korea, and the European Union.

Disturbance to populations, particularly breeding populations, of ecologically important species is another key stressor on Arctic biodiversity. Vessel, plane, and helicopter disturbance in the Arctic has been known to cause severe disturbance, particularly for densely packed breeding bird colonies, where such disturbance can cause adult birds to leave their nests, eggs, or chicks.^[13] This stressor can be easily resolved if the Arctic States identify bird breeding colonies within their exclusive economic zones and avoid these areas during the breeding seasons. This measure has already been taken by several countries, particularly Canada and the United States. If all the Arctic States do not take this precaution, the increased Arctic shipping due to melting sea ice and ease of access to the Arctic coasts could cause severe disturbance for endangered and ecologically important bird populations.

Commercial shipping accidents also threaten Arctic biodiversity because of the pollutants and contaminants these accidents discharge into ecosystems. These pollutants not only cause harm to biological diversity, but also affect indigenous populations who depend on Arctic biodiversity for their sustenance. Methyl mercury, a contaminant from vessels and shipping pollution, has been found in high levels in indigenous Arctic communities because of the way that this heavy metal tends to be biomagnified in marine ecosystems.^[14] Additionally, high levels of lead were seen in the blood samples from indigenous communities, which are also likely caused by shipping pollution and accidents in the Arctic.^[15] In the past 20 years, there have been over 100 shipping accidents in the Arctic Circle including collisions, vessel damage, fires, and even instances in which entire vessels have sunk.^[16] The pollutants from these incidents threaten not only indigenous communities, but also marine biodiversity. Though the exact effects of lead poisoning, methyl mercury poisoning, and other pollutants in marine ecosystems is not entirely known, they certainly are not positive additives for the marine environment.

It would be remiss not to comment on the impact of climate change on the biodiversity in the Arctic Circle. Much of this biodiversity has evolved over many thousands of years to be equipped to survive in Arctic temperatures, and will not be able to survive in a climate with over 2℃ of warming. This climate change – including rising air temperatures and sea surface temperatures – is happening so fast that many Arctic species will not be able to evolve in order to persist in a dramatically warmer environment. However, the Arctic Council alone cannot address climate change. Nonetheless, the Arctic Council should involve itself with actively participating in global climate change conversations in order to express the dire effects that rapid global warming is having on the Arctic biodiversity, indigenous communities, and marine habitats.^[17]

Though these are by no means the only anthropogenic stressors on Arctic marine biodiversity, they are important examples of the extreme effects that humans are having on this important ecosystem. Other important stressors to consider are oil, gas, and mineral extraction, invasive species carried by shipping and tourism vessels, and international stressors on ecologically important migratory species. The Arctic Council has the potential to facilitate bilateral and multilateral cooperation between the Arctic States to mitigate some of these threats to Arctic marine biodiversity in the future.

Multilateral Agreements and Suggested Policy Implementation

Multilateral treaties containing regulations to conserve important Arctic ecosystems and minimize the use of harmful commercial fishing techniques would be the most effective way to minimize biodiversity loss in the Arctic. In the Arctic’s southern counterpart, Antarctica, a treaty called the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) protects marine living resources by implementing strict regulations on commercial fishing and vessel monitoring. A multilateral treaty in the Arctic implementing basic commercial fishing regulations would significantly increase Arctic biodiversity protection and create a framework for further biodiversity protection in the future. Because all Arctic marine ecosystems are interconnected, this treaty would ensure that each state does not inflict environmental harm on the ecosystems of other states by exploiting important ecosystems, in accordance with Principle 21 of the Stockholm Declaration.

Since its formation in 1996, the Arctic Council has facilitated the creation of two multilateral treaties. The Agreement on Cooperation on Aeronautical and Maritime Search and Rescue in the Arctic was the first of these multilateral treaties. It was signed in May 2011 in Nuuk, Greenland. This treaty created a methodical process for search and rescue to be carried out in the Arctic, and assigned areas in which each state was responsible for carrying out search and rescue procedures.^[18] The second multilateral treaty facilitated by the Arctic Council was the Agreement on Cooperation on Marine Oil Pollution Preparedness and Response in the Arctic. This treaty was signed in May 2013 in Kiruna, Sweden and sets forth procedures for coordination and cooperation between Arctic States in the event of a pollution incident in the Arctic.^[19] These two recent multilateral agreements suggest that the Arctic Council is an effective facilitator of negotiations pertaining to multilateral treaties.

The creation of these two treaties shows that there is potential for the Arctic Council to facilitate the creation of a multilateral treaty pertaining to biodiversity protection. In Antarctica, 24 states have ratified CCAMLR, including four Arctic States – the United States, Russia, Sweden, and Norway. Though an identical treaty would be difficult to implement in the Arctic Ocean for several reasons, including the presence of permanent populations who depend on the marine living resources of the Arctic for subsistence and the lack of an overarching treaty framework like the Antarctic Treaty, many of the components of CCAMLR could be applied towards a multilateral biodiversity treaty in the Arctic.

CCAMLR not only set forth important provisions for biodiversity protection, but also provided a framework through which biodiversity protection can be continually increased. The treaty set restrictions on catching endangered species, limited exploratory fisheries, and created bans on certain fishing types (night fishing and longline fishing). Additionally, the treaty implemented a Vessel Monitoring System, which has been an effective method of preventing illegal commercial fishing.^[20] In October 2016, the parties of CCAMLR created the world’s largest marine reserve off the Antarctic Coast in an area called the Ross Sea. This agreement was reached under the supervision and legal framework of CCAMLR. This marine reserve, which will be a no-catch marine sanctuary, will protect one the Antarctica’s most unique and vulnerable ecosystems from commercial fishing and exploitation.^[21]

The success of CCAMLR is largely due to the ecosystem-based approach of the treaty. Through extensive monitoring of critical marine areas and designation of ecologically important zones and species, CCAMLR has created a treaty that protects areas and species that are critical to the conservation of marine biodiversity. The protocol of CCAMLR has created an Ecosystem Monitoring Program (CEMP) that constantly monitors levels of critical species in at all trophic levels in critical marine areas.^[22] This monitoring program has been highly successful and has aided officials in designating zones that are in need of stricter fishing regulations. The ecosystem monitoring includes both scientific data collection and data collection from all Antarctic fisheries. Fish catch data from all commercial fisheries in the Antarctic must be submitted to the Secretariat within three months of collection. This data is then compiled to determine where indictor species are declining and growing.^[23]

Arctic ecosystem monitoring is being conducted to an extent by the working group for the Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF) under the Arctic Council. This working group has created the Circumpolar Biodiversity Monitoring Programme (CBMP), which consists of indigenous community groups and environmental groups working together to collect data on biodiversity in the Arctic Ocean. The CBMP has created the Arctic Biodiversity Data Service to collect this information. At this time, these efforts by the working groups of the Arctic Council have not generated enough data to inform concrete ecosystem-based policy suggestions for a multilateral biodiversity treaty concerning the entire Arctic Ocean ecosystem.

Other methods of assessing Arctic marine ecosystem areas of productivity and vulnerability have been suggested, however neither the Arctic Council nor CAFF has formally adopted any of these methods. Notably, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has written a detailed report concerning their protection suggestions for the Arctic Ocean based on their research and conclusions regarding areas of biological significance. This report, called the Rapid Assessment of Circum-Arctic Ecosystem Resilience (RACER) suggests an alternative method of assessing marine ecosystem productivity and resilience.^[24]  This report was presented to the Arctic Council by WWF scientists, however, additional research is needed before this method can be used to determine ecosystem-based fishing regulations and conservation methods.

Policy Suggestions for Multilateral Agreements

The Marine Fish Expert Network, a group of scientists designated by the Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF) working group and consisting of scientists from all of the eight Arctic States, expressed in their most recent Arctic Marine Biodiversity Monitoring Plan Annual Report that their top priority is data aggregation concerning marine fish populations.^[25] Because of the insufficient amount of data reporting from the current Arctic Council monitoring group, the Arctic Council does not have adequate information regarding fish populations to implement commercial fishing regulations or shipping lane regulations based on strong, ecosystem based evidence. This suggests that the first step towards a multilateral biodiversity protection agreement should be a multilateral agreement concerning the reporting of fish catch data from all fisheries and commercial fishing operations in the Arctic Ocean in order to generate sufficient data to understand the long-term ecosystem trends in all regions of the Arctic Ocean.

This is a procedure that is required in Antarctica under CCAMLR, and requires little extra work from commercial fishing vessels, which often record their fish catch regardless of whether this data is being disclosed to authorities.^[26] All vessels entering into areas under the jurisdiction of CCAMLR are required to submit data reports to a “monthly fine-scale catch and effort data reporting system for trawl, longline and pot fisheries.”^[27] Almost all commercial fisheries use either trawl, longline, and/or pot fishing techniques, and commercial fisheries which do not use these techniques are significantly less harmful to the marine environment. In order to report this data, every Contracting Party to CCAMLR is required to attain the necessary data reports from their commercial fishing vessels and submit this data to the CCAMLR secretariat. The CCAMLR Conservation Measure detailing this procedure reads: “At the end of each reporting period, each Contracting Party shall obtain from each of its vessels its total catch of all species, including by-catch species, and total days and hours fished for that period and shall, by facsimile or email, transmit the aggregated catch and days and hours fished for its vessels.”^[28]

The Arctic Council could facilitate a multilateral agreement implementing similar measures within the Arctic Ocean. Though different Arctic States have different opinions on what constitutes the Arctic Ocean, the Arctic Council has defined the area of the Arctic Ocean in the past in order to implement the Agreement on Cooperation on Aeronautical and Maritime Search and Rescue in the Arctic. A multilateral agreement requiring the Arctic States to submit data from all trawl, longline, and pot fishing operations in the Arctic Ocean would allow the working groups of the Arctic to gain a better understanding of changing marine population dynamics in the Arctic as well as better understand which areas of the Arctic Ocean are important areas of biological diversity and productivity.

This specific multilateral agreement would not immediately set forth any restrictions on commercial fishing in the Arctic, but rather create a mechanism through which the impacts of commercial fishing in the Arctic Ocean can be better understood and allow the working groups of the Arctic Council to suggest strong ecosystem-based biodiversity protection agreements in the future. Additionally, this measure would have important implications towards determining which shipping routes would have the least impact on biological hotspots and areas of biological productivity. The need for this agreement is quite urgent, particularly considering that ocean warming is causing many fish populations and important fisheries to shift towards cooler waters in the north and south, towards the Arctic Circle and Antarctica.^[29] These global marine populations shifts could be better documented and understood if fish catch data from trawl, longline, and pot fishing operations in the Arctic Ocean was reported to the Arctic Council.

Additionally, a treaty ensuring that commercial fishing operations will not begin in the international waters of the Central Arctic Ocean at any time is needed to ensure that this area remains ecologically productive until further research is conducted in the area. Currently, a voluntary declaration signed by five Arctic States – Canada, the Kingdom of Denmark, the Kingdom of Norway, the Russian Federation, and the United States of America – declares that this area will not be used for commercial fishing.^[30] However, several other nations that are not part of this agreement could begin to exploit the fish populations in this area as deglaciation continues and the marine areas under the Arctic ice caps become accessible to fishing. A stronger, legally binding international multilateral agreement is needed to protect this area until further scientific research concerning marine populations is conducted in this region.

One difficulty in implementing this agreement is that not only do the eight Arctic States need to be contracting parties, but so do any nations that have current or future commercial fishing interests in the Arctic Ocean. This includes China, which has already indicated intentions to expand its commercial fishing operations poleward, Korea, the European Union, and Japan. Though these nations are observers of the Arctic Council, they are not participatory or permanent members, which makes their involvement through the Arctic Council more difficult. However, it is possible that both UNCLOS and the Arctic Council could play a role in the creation of this important multilateral agreement.

Multilateral environmental agreements are likely the most effective way to safeguard Arctic marine environments, however, they are also difficult to implement and negotiate. However, the Arctic Council has the potential to facilitate these agreements to safeguard Arctic marine biodiversity and promote research to further scientific knowledge about these important marine ecosystems. A multilateral agreement requiring reporting of fish catch data to the Arctic Council would be an important first step towards better understanding Arctic marine ecosystems. This information could aid the task forces of the Arctic Council in providing strong policy suggestions concerning shipping routes and biodiversity protection in the future.

Bilateral Agreements and Suggested Policy Implementation

Bilateral agreements concerning specific procedures and regulations regarding marine biodiversity protection are the first step towards the creation of comprehensive multilateral marine biodiversity protection agreements in the Arctic. Several Arctic nations have ratified bilateral agreements concerning cooperation on specific Arctic issues and these bilateral agreements highlight the possibility of bilateral cooperation between Arctic States. In some cases, these bilateral treaties can be strengthened and annexed to include biodiversity protection measures. In other cases, new bilateral treaties concerning biodiversity protection can be implemented and negotiated through the framework of the Arctic Council.

As this section will discuss further, the 1983 bilateral agreement between the Government of Canada and the Government of the Kingdom of Denmark concerning cooperation related to the marine environments of Baffin Bay, Davis Strait, and Nares Strait is a key example of an existing bilateral treaty framework that can be strengthened to include measures to help protect marine biodiversity. The creation of a third annex to this treaty to implement biodiversity protection measures would be an important first step towards the creation of legally binding treaties concerning biodiversity protection in the Arctic.

Another treaty that could be annexed to include biodiversity provisions is the bilateral treaty between the Russian Federation and Norway concerning oil spill response procedures in the Barents Sea.^[31] This treaty could potentially include an annex mandating that both parties create a marine reserve of a specified size somewhere within their boundary of the Barents Sea to offset the negative effects of continuing oil drilling in this area and to contribute to the ecological resilience Barents Sea ecosystem.^[32] Marine reserves, defined as no-take MPAs, have been shown to facilitate ecosystem resilience and, though they are not the best long term option for biodiversity protection, are an important method of protecting marine biodiversity and vulnerable ecosystems.^[33] Both Norway and Russia are signatories of the Convention on Biological Diversity, and this annex could be a way for Norway and Russia to showcase their commitment to conserving and protecting biodiversity.

Bilateral agreements can be useful in addressing a number of issues relating to the protection of Arctic biodiversity including conservation of transboundary ecosystems, assessment and determination of transboundary shipping routes in order to minimize disturbance to marine biodiversity, and prevention of contamination and pollution. Commercial shipping in the Arctic Ocean is going to become an increasingly threatening issue to Arctic marine biodiversity as Arctic sea ice continues to melt rapidly. Adjacent Arctic States should work together to create shipping routes that minimize harm to biodiversity by considering all available ecosystem data. Additionally, WWF’s RACER ecosystem monitoring method could be utilized in order to determine biologically productive and resilient areas that should be avoided by shipping routes.^[34]

Policy Suggestion for a Bilateral Agreement: Baffin Bay and Davis Strait

The Baffin Bay is located between the Western coast of Greenland and the Eastern coast of the Nunavut province of Canada. This 266,024-mi² sea is connected to the Labrador Sea by the Davis Strait and to the Arctic Ocean by the Nares Strait. This area contains the North Water Polynya and several cold-water coral reefs, which are important areas for marine biodiversity, including marine mammals and seabirds. This region is one of the most important areas of biological productivity in the Arctic due to nutrient cycling and the presence of unique cold-water coral reefs.^[35]

Ringed seals, beluga whales, narwhals, polar bears, and other endangered Arctic species reside throughout Baffin Bay and the North Water Polynya, making the area ecologically important for the region’s most charismatic megafauna. It is estimated that over 80% of the world’s beluga whale populations live in the Baffin Bay and Davis Strait.^[36] It is also a critical nesting habitat for many endangered species of seabirds, particularly the thick-billed murre.^[37] Because Baffin Bay does not freeze over in the wintertime, it is an attractive habitat for both migratory and nonmigratory species.

Indigenous Inuit communities have lived near Baffin Bay for thousands of years because of the rich opportunities that the Baffin Bay ecosystem provides for year-round fishing and hunting. Today, there are 16,000 indigenous residents of Baffin Bay who depend on the marine resources of Baffin Bay for subsistence. However, in recent years, commercial fishing in this area has increased exponentially.^[38] Many of these commercial fisheries use bottom trawls, which research has shown to cause severe harm to marine ecosystems.^[39] Even in cases where commercial fisheries do not contribute to overharvest, they still contribute to coral-reef destruction. Bottom trawling, in particular, is harming the cold-water coral reefs in Baffin Bay and Davis Strait, which are some of the oldest cold-water coral reefs in the world and are home to hundreds of species on fish. These fish populations are not only important to the livelihoods of indigenous communities, but also to many species of migratory birds who nest in the areas surrounding Baffin Bay.^[40] These 2000-year-old coral reefs should be protected by a bilateral environmental agreement between Canada and Denmark (Greenland).

Drilling for oil and gas in the Baffin Bay and Davis Strait has also become an increasingly large possibility in recent years. Because of the likelihood of oil and gas deposits in the area and the proximity to oil and gas markets, Baffin Bay has been considered for many years to be a possible site of future oil and gas drilling. In 2010, Shell Corporation was awarded two license blocks in Baffin Bay, Greenland, and the development of oil and gas operations has begun in the area.^[41] Shell is only one of several oil companies who have acquired licenses blocks in Baffin Bay, both in Canada and Greenland, within the last ten years with the intent of determining the prospects for oil and gas drilling.

Because of the importance of the Baffin Bay and Davis Strait ecosystems to indigenous communities, the greater Arctic ecosystem, and populations of endangered charismatic megafauna, the governments of Canada and Denmark (Greenland) should work together to create a bilateral agreement to decrease ecological harm in these areas and promote the conservation of biodiversity. A treaty framework for this area is already in place in the form of a treaty signed by the two governments in 1983 called the “Agreement between in Government of Canada and the Government of the Kingdom of Denmark for Cooperation Relating to the Marine Environment.” A third annex could be added to this treaty to include measures for biodiversity protection not only for the benefit of the biodiversity itself, but also for the benefit of indigenous communities.^[42]

Currently, the treaty contains important measures for regulating commercial shipping and drilling to minimize pollution. The treaty mandates exchange of information regarding drilling and mining projects in Baffin Bay and Davis Strait, and monitoring of all shipping, fishing, and tourism vessels. The two annexes of this treaty set forth a plan in regards to pollution incidents caused by oil and gas extraction and shipping activities, respectively. These plans require immediate notification by the party responsible for the pollution incident and mandate that all cleanup costs be paid by the nation in which the pollution incident originated.^[43] Additionally, the treaty recognizes the importance of preserving the Baffin Bay and Davis Strait ecosystems and states that both Canada and Denmark (Greenland) are “conscious of the responsibility to protect and enhance this unique marine environment for the benefit of their peoples” and “desiring to develop further bilateral cooperation.”^[44] These passages suggest that a third annex could be added to this treaty in order to protect and conserve the important marine biodiversity in this area. Possible measures could include commercial fishing regulations containing bycatch limits on endangered species of birds and mammals and outlawing bottom (deep water) trawls, regulations prohibiting oil and gas extraction operations in areas near endangered migratory bird breeding colonies, and restitution requirements to indigenous communities when pollution incidents occur in order to help these communities secure food so they do not need to eat marine wildlife that may have high levels of lead and methyl mercury. These solutions all address problems described above more fully in the “threats to biodiversity” section.

A commercial fishing regulation regarding bycatch limits on endangered species of birds and mammals and a regulation prohibiting oil and gas extraction operations in areas near endangered migratory bird breeding colonies and would be based on Principle 21 of the Stockholm Declaration, which says that states cannot harm environmental harm to other states. Migratory bird species who breed in colonies in one part of Baffin Bay and endangered birds and mammals who are subject to bycatch in Baffin Bay likely play an important ecosystem role for both Canada and Greenland.^[45] The mammal populations are likely important for indigenous communities in both Greenland and Canada and migratory bird species are likely important in not only these two states, but also in countries where these birds migrate from and fill an ecosystem niche in other seasons. An additional regulation mandating restitution to indigenous communities when pollution incidents occur would be based on the Polluter Pays Principle. Indigenous communities all over the globe often bear the burden of pollution incidents. These communities should not have high mortality rates because of pollution of their food source, and they should have a way to buy other food sources that are not polluted if they so choose.

These are certainly not the only possible measures for an annex to the Canada and Greenland treaty concerning the marine environment of Baffin Bay and the Davis Strait, but they are examples of the way in which bilateral biodiversity protection agreements could help to mitigate some of the anthropogenic stressors on vulnerable and ecologically significant Arctic marine environments. Bilateral treaties concerning the marine environment between other parties to the Arctic Council could be extended in a similar way to implement regulations to protect ecologically and socially important areas of marine biodiversity. Additionally, new bilateral treaties could be negotiated to help protect biodiversity.

Conclusion

International law has the potential to regulate and diminish many of the anthropogenic stressors on Arctic marine biodiversity. Currently, fishing, shipping, and drilling prospects in the Arctic are threatening Arctic marine ecosystems, and these activities must become regulated to minimize harm to Arctic biodiversity. Arctic biodiversity is in need of protection not only because of its intrinsic value, but also because Arctic marine biodiversity is critical to the survival of indigenous Arctic peoples. In the coming years, the Arctic Council is uniquely positioned to assert itself as a facilitator of the creation of new bilateral and multilateral agreements to protect Arctic biodiversity.

A multilateral agreement requiring that Arctic States submit all fish catch data from trawl, longline, and pot fishing operations in the Arctic to the working groups of the Arctic Council would create a mechanism through which the long term biodiversity trends in Arctic ecosystems can be better understood. This agreement would be an important first step in the creation of a pan-Arctic biodiversity treaty system and would better allow the working groups of the Arctic Council to assess the ecological impact of particular shipping routes and oil, gas, and mineral extraction sites. With this information, the Arctic Council could make stronger ecosystem-based policy suggestions to protect biodiversity in the Arctic. Bilateral agreements also can play an important role in increasing biodiversity protection in the Arctic. New bilateral treaties be implemented to conserve transboundary ecosystems and minimize disturbance and contamination of marine biodiversity. Additionally, existing bilateral treaties can be annexed to implement measures to protect biodiversity and the marine environment.

The Arctic is entering a period of intense and rapid change as a result of global warming, glacial retreat, and sea ice loss. These changes increase the dangers of disturbance, pollution, and exploitation of marine Arctic ecosystems and intensify the need for international environmental law to protect this fragile and unique marine environment. In the coming years, the Arctic Council has the potential to facilitate the negotiation and creation of multilateral and bilateral agreements to ensure that the marine ecosystems of the Arctic are conserved and protected.

Endnotes

^[1] Council, Arctic. “Arctic Biodiversity Assessment.” February 5, 2013, page 10.

^[2] Johnsen, K. I., Alfthan, B., Hislop, L., Skaalvik, J. F. (Eds). 2010. Protecting Arctic Biodiversity. United Nations Environment Programme, GRID-Arendal, www.grida.no.

^[3] IUCN-WCPA (World Commission on Protected Areas). 2008. Establishing Marine Protected Area Networks—Making It Happen. Washington, D.C.: IUCN-WCPA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and The Nature Conservancy.

^[4] Allison, Gary W., Jane Lubchenco, and Mark H. Carr. “Marine reserves are necessary but not sufficient for marine conservation.” Ecological applications 8, no. sp1 (1998).

^[5] The White House, National Strategy for the Arctic Region (Washington, D.C.: May 10, 2013).

^[6] Government of Finland, Finland’s Strategy for the Arctic Region 2013, Arctic Council, 6.2. International Cooperation in the Arctic.

^[7] Council, Arctic. “Declaration on the Establishment of the Arctic Council.” Ottawa, Canada 19 (1996).

^[8] Nations, United. “Convention on biological diversity.” United Nations (1992).

^[9] Council, Arctic. “Arctic Biodiversity Assessment.” February 5 (2013): 2013.

^[10] “Permanent Participants,” The Arctic Council, accessed December 19th, 2016, http://www.arctic-council.org/index.php/en/about-us/permanent-participants.

^[11] “Arctic Biodiversity Assessment,” 79.

^[12]  Declaration concerning the prevention of unregulated high seas fishing in the central Arctic Ocean, (2015) Oslo, Norway.

^[13] Boyd, Hugh, and Jesper Madsen. “Impacts of global change on Arctic-breeding bird populations and migration.” In Global change and Arctic terrestrial ecosystems, pp. 201-217. Springer New York, 1997.

^[14] Hansen, Jens C. “Environmental contaminants and human health in the Arctic.” Toxicology letters 112 (2000): 119-125.

^[15] Ibid.

^[16]  “Arctic Biodiversity Assessment,” 86.

^[17] Johannessen, Ola M., Lennart Bengtsson, Martin W. Miles, Svetlana I. Kuzmina, Vladimir A. Semenov, Genrikh V. Alekseev, Andrei P. Nagurnyi et al. “Arctic climate change: Observed and modelled temperature and sea‐ice variability.” Tellus A 56, no. 4 (2004): 328-341.

^[18] Agreement on Cooperation on Aeronautical and Maritime Search and Rescue in the Arctic (Nuuk, Greenland: May 12, 2011).

^[19] Agreement on Cooperation on Marine Oil Pollution Preparedness and Response in the Arctic (Kiruna, Sweden: May 15, 2013).

^[20] Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, Canberra, 20 May 1980, in force 7 April 1982, www.ccamlr.org.

^[21] Michelle Innis, “Coast of Antarctica Will Host World’s Largest Marine Reserve,” New York Times, October 27, 2016, accessed October 27, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/world/australia/antarctica-ross-sea-marine-park.html.

^[22] Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources.

^[23] Agnew, D.J. (1997) ‘Review—The CCAMLR Ecosystem Monitoring Programme’, Antarctic Science, 9(3), pp. 235–242.

^[24] Christie, P., and M. Sommerkorn. “RACER: Rapid assessment of circum-Arctic ecosystem resilience.” Ottawa, Canada: WWF Global Arctic Programme (2012).

^[25] Arctic Marine Biodiversity Monitoring Plan Annual Report 2016 Annual Report on the Implementation of the Circumpolar Biodiversity Monitoring Program’s Arctic Marine Biodiversity Monitoring Plan (CBMP-Marine Plan), CAFF Monitoring Series Report No. 23. October 2016.

^[26] Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, Schedule of Conservation Measures in Force, As amended by the Commission at the Thirty-third Meeting, 20 to 31 October 2014.

^[27] Ibid.

^[28] Ibid.

^[29] Rose, G. A. 2005. On distributional responses of North Atlantic fish to climate change. ICES Journal of Marine Science, 62: 1360–1374.

^[30]  Declaration concerning the prevention of unregulated high seas fishing in the central Arctic Ocean, (2015) Oslo, Norway.

^[31] Council, Arctic. “Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment 2009.” (2009), page 169.

^[32] Sydnes, Are Kristoffer, and Maria Sydnes. “Norwegian–Russian cooperation on oil-spill response in the Barents Sea.” Marine Policy 39 (2013): 257-264.

^[33] Allison, Gary W., Jane Lubchenco, and Mark H. Carr. “Marine reserves are necessary but not sufficient for marine conservation.” Ecological applications 8, no. sp1 (1998).

^[34] Christie, P., and M. Sommerkorn. “RACER: Rapid assessment of circum-Arctic ecosystem resilience.” Ottawa, Canada: WWF Global Arctic Programme (2012).

^[35] Heide-Jørgensen MP, Hansen RG, Nielsen NH, Rasmussen M (2013) The significance of the North Water to Arctic top predators. Ambio 42:596–610.

^[36] Pew Charitable Trusts. “Baffin Bay and Davis Strait.” Baffin Bay and Davis Strait. Pew Charitable Trusts, n.d. Web. 12 Dec. 2016.

^[37] David Irons, et. al. CAFF Monitoring Report No.17. CAFF International Secretariat, Akureyri, Iceland.

^[38] Pew Charitable Trusts – Baffin Bay.

^[39] National Research Council. 2002. Effects of Trawling and Dredging on Seafloor Habitat. National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.

^[40] Pew Charitable Trusts – Baffin Bay.

^[41] “Shell in the Arctic.” Published by Royal Dutch Shell plc, for Shell Exploration and Production International B.V., The Netherlands.

^[42] Agreement between the Government of Canada and the Government of the Kingdom of Denmark for Cooperation Relating to the Marine Environment. Can.-Den. August 26, 1983, E101887 – CTS No. 19.

^[43] Ibid.

^[44] Ibid.

^[45] Mosbech, A. and Johnson, S. R. (1999), Late winter distribution and abundance of sea-associated birds in south-western Greenland, the Davis Strait and southern Baffin Bay. Polar Research, 18: 1–17.