Which party has the best climate policy?

This question has been central to the brief federal election campaign. Climate experts and commentators have offered perspectives and report cards, most of which point to the all-around strengths of the Liberal Party platform, with the occasional kind words about the feasibility and mere existence of the Conservative platform, or the vague ambition of the NDP platform. I’ll be upfront: I agree with Mark Jaccard, Katharine Hayhoe, Andrew Leach, and my colleague Kathryn Harrison that the Liberal plan appears the strongest.

I am, though, concerned that too much of the policy discussion focuses on the 2030 target. Climate change is all about the long-term. When you take a longer view, the criteria for a feasible or an ambitious plan changes.

To explain, I’ve calculated national emissions pathways which are consistent with a likely (2/3) chance of avoiding different levels of global warming. The analysis is based on the latest global carbon budget data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 6th Assessment Report published in August. My methods follow that of a similar analysis conducted in 2019 with older data. Also, huge thanks to Eric Leinberger from UBC for help with the graphics!

The first analysis uses an equitable distribution of the global carbon budget, in which Canada receives 0.5%, in line with our share of the global population. Why such a small portion of the global budget? We could assign portions based on emissions, rather than population, but that implies that a low-emitting developing nation has to cut emissions at the same rate as a wealthy, high-emitting nation. That would be unfair, and also untenable.

According to this analysis, the party targets for 2030 fall in between the < 2°C pathway and the more moderate < 3 °C pathway. Granted, these are just the targets. Whether the policies are sufficient to meet the targets is a separate question, addressed in part below.

Being Canadian, I find it helpful to think of the pathways as ski slopes. The < 3 °C pathway is like a blue intermediate run with some black diamond difficult stretches. The < 2 °C pathway is a challenging double black diamond full of moguls. If navigated successfully, it brings the country to net-zero around 2050.

The < 1.5 °C pathway, unfortunately, is a cliff surrounded by fences and caution signs. This is because the budget remaining for < 1.5 °C is equivalent to less than three years of current annual emissions. As much I want deep emissions cuts, to reduce emissions that quickly, if it were even possible, would be unconscionable given how our current energy system works; we’d need to shutter some industries, transportation, power generation, and home heating.

If we chose a less equitable division of the global carbon budget – an intermediate portion (1.1% of the remaining global budget) between the equitable (0.5%) and even (1.6%) portions – the emissions pathways look slightly more realistic. In this less equitable scenario, the parties’ targets fall between the < 1.5 °C and the < 2 °C pathways, as does the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050.

These results paint a stark picture, as I noted in the 2019 analysis. It is likely impossible at this point for Canada to achieve its full “fair share” of emissions reductions to avoid 1.5 °C warming, absent large investment in effort in other parts of the world.

I present this for context. The truth is that every action still counts. The more we reduce emissions, the less the planet warms, and the less people suffer. Even if we can’t do our fair share to achieve a selected level of warming, we can still do as much as is feasible to reduce future harm. Given that, the shape of the emissions pathways points to three key criteria for evaluating the party climate plans.

1. Does the plan put Canada on a path to net-zero?

The year 2030 should not be the endpoint in climate policy discussions. The steep pathways show that rather than ask whether the plan achieves the 2030 target, we should ask whether the plan helps Canada accelerate past the 2030 target. To use a baseball analogy, we can’t slide into the first base. We need to round the base and head for second.

This, to me, is where the Conservative Party plan clearly fails. Like others, I’m pleased to see the party release a detailed plan that includes both pricing and regulatory proposals for the first time in its history. The moderate grades in other assessments (5/10 from Jaccard, B/B- from Hayhoe), however, read to me like awards for participation. Too much credit is given for feasibility, and too little attention is paid to sustainability.

First of all, the plan invests in expanding the fossil fuel industry, and features no plan to transition workers from the industry. Given that net-zero pathways show sharply reduced demand for Canadian heavy oil, the plan is the inverse of accelerating beyond 2030.

Second, the plan would not increase the carbon price beyond $50, which means by 2030, the price will be far behind what’s necessary to incite deeper emissions cuts [yes, the plan has a possible increase to $170/ton but that is only if the US also adopts the price, which any casual student of the US Congress knows is not going to happen]. For consumers, the effect of carbon price would also be largely deadened, by converting the price into a feeder for a “low carbon savings account.” Here’s an example how this perverse system would work (my math). At the proposed peak carbon price of $50/ton, a Honda Civic driver would get ~$130/year in the account to spend on things like electric bikes (based on average distance Canadians drive in a year). In other words, it would take 19 years of driving your car to buy a $2,500 e-bike. To get more money, you need to drive more, or drive a less efficient vehicle, and put more greenhouse gases in the air. To use my colleague Kathryn Harrison’s word, the account is a “gimmick,” not a climate policy.

Finally, the Conservative Party appears to be pushing for a return to the previous 2030 target of a 30% reduction below 2005 levels. The above analyses show it is least likely to be in line with achieving Canada’s fair share to avoiding < 2 °C warming. Changing the target could also lead to international embarrassment. The new target of -40 to -45% has already been officially submitted to the United Nations, which means a Conservative-led government might arrive at the upcoming climate summit in November asking to weaken the national target, and Canada might win more “fossil of the week” awards.

2. Does the plan feasibly build on existing initiatives?

To feasibly achieve net-zero by mid-century, emissions reductions need to start now. That means we should build on momentum of existing policies and systems, lest we waste even more time. Presuming the government follows democratic norms, new regulatory systems can take years of consultation and planning.

This is my central concern about the NDP plan. While I appreciate the ambition of the plan, it is surprisingly weak on details, and it is very hard to understand how that ambition could be met. The proposal to develop regulations for each sector, and to change the output-based pricing system used to protect Canadian industries, will take years of consultation and risk stalling ongoing progress. The output-based pricing system, in which the carbon price is only charged above an average emissions rate for that industry, may look from the outside like a way to “protect polluters” but is actually an elegant way to create an incentive for reducing emissions without risking loss of jobs and business to other countries. Given how long it has taken for the federal government to take tangible action on climate change, it seems wiser to build on all the work of the current government, rather than to start from scratch on new systems.

Note: This concern can also be applied to aspects of the Conservative plan, especially the low carbon savings account, which could take years to establish.

3. How does the plan help the rest of the world respond to climate change?

Given the rapidly shrinking carbon budget for avoiding 1.5 °C warming, the next government needs a plan to help more vulnerable nations prepare for a warmer world. Elections tend to focus on domestic policies, so it is not a surprise that none of the parties capable of forming a government have been vocal about international initiatives. Here, we can at least hope that the next government represents the country well at COP26, the upcoming and pandemic-delayed climate summit, and supports more climate finance for the developing world and greater efforts of adaptation capacity building.

Whatever happens in this election, I ask that all Canadians keep pushing their representatives, whatever the party, to keep their eyes on the long-term goal of eliminating greenhouse gas emissions. We need plans that are feasible and ambitious. Interim targets are there to help build momentum to the ultimate objective – rounding the bases and heading for home.

Cities under lockdown. Tens of thousands dead. People wearing masks and avoiding their own family. Millions joining the unemployment rolls. Only essential stores and businesses operating. Demand for oil so low that producers have to pay to get rid of it. No schools, no sports, no movies.

Imagine walking into a time machine on New Year’s Day and walking out a mere 100 days later. It would be like dropping into a zombie flick at the one-hour mark. Who would believe it? What could possibly have happened? You’d get back into the DeLorean and ask Doc to smack the flux capacitor with a wrench.

That is the thing about crises. They are hard to believe until they happen. And when they happen, it is hard to believe we didn’t see them coming or better prepare ourselves.

Experts are not immune. I remember stepping into a small boat in Kiribati eight years ago, thinking I was a little fatigued from three weeks of the equatorial heat. I spent the next week barely conscious, stranded on an outer island with no medical care, using the few lucid moments made possible by my local friends feeding me coconut water wondering how I missed the very early signs of dengue fever. Signs I knew, signs that I had learned in grad school.

Even with the evidence right in front of us, our imagination often fails. You know on paper that something can happen, but you don’t imagine that it really will.

Failure of the imagination is, to me, the central thing that unites climate change and the novel coronavirus pandemic.

To be clear, the two global crises have different problem dynamics, in terms of the type of fear they inspire, their time scale, and the link between cause and effect. The pandemic represents what risk perception experts call a “dread” risk. We see it as an immediate, catastrophic threat to our health and to that of our family. Tracing of cause and effect is possible. The direct impact of pandemic decisions we make – or do not make – can be apparent within 14 days. Practicing physical distancing not only helps protect the entire community, it directly protects you and your family from the virus.

Climate change is different. It is a crisis not because of the immediate impact of our actions, but because the actions we choose over the next decade or so will have impacts for decades and centuries beyond. The temporal lag decreases the sense of dread and immediacy for many people. It is about our legacy as much as it is about us. Like with the pandemic, our actions influence the system as a whole, but an individual action cannot be linked to an individual impact. Climate scientists can estimate the contribution of human-caused climate change to an extreme event, but your neighbour choosing to drive an old-school Hummer cannot be directly blamed for the heavy rainfall on your street last week.

Because of these differences in the problem dynamics, we have to be careful drawing lessons from the successes of the pandemic response for the fight against climate change. The political will to take dramatic action (albeit late), the public willingness to sacrifice personal freedoms and comforts, and the overall speed and scale of the response are related to the immediate, catastrophic fears brought on by the pandemic and the greater ability to see cause and effect.

The collective failure to imagine the extent of the pandemic and the extent of our response is, however, very instructive for climate change.

Only public health experts were prepared to envision our current scenario, and even public health experts were slow to warn of this scenario becoming a reality. We were all slow to act because we couldn’t imagine this would really happen. Now that it is happening, it is hard to imagine not taking the precautionary measures. How were we that dense? How didn’t we see this coming, despite the clear warnings from experts and from the parts of the world exposed first?

Sound familiar? People say that climate change is a failure of our politics, of our market, of our technologies, of our morality. To me, it is a similar failure of the imagination. At first, a failure to imagine it could happen or happen soon. Now, a failure to imagine we can really do something about it.

Like the pandemic, we’re not learning enough from the vulnerable places that have experienced severe impacts, nor from the proactive places that took early action to limit the impacts. Every severe coastal flooding event, every severe heat wave, is a Wuhan-level early warning to the rest of the world. And every company that reduces reliance on fossil fuels, every town that prepares for sea-level rise, is a South Korea-level early example for the rest of the world.

We are so rooted in a certain way of powering our lives, fueling our movement, and heating our homes that we have been slow to imagine and embrace a different future.

Change is a threat to those in power and those unable to envision a transition to an alternative world. Fossil fuel interests are scared of losing power, losing ‘market share,’ and losing money, and many of the rest of us are scared of losing jobs, losing livelihoods, or losing what we know. Those with power, whether in government or in industry, have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and quashing imaginations. It is a worldview of constraints, not possibilities.

Take my home of Canada as an example. The government, the banks, and others have struggled to imagine a future without oil and gas as a major industry. They have been stuck in a centuries-old British view of Canada as a source of raw extractable resources: the new colony, existing residents be damned, was a place to extract resources, not a place to develop. First trees, then crops and fish, then minerals, then oil and gas. We now threaten to keep doubling down on the past, investing in fossil fuel projects that are incompatible with a low carbon future.

At the same time, Canada is rich in other natural resources: wind, water, and sun. Canada in principle has the resources to power all of North America’s homes, factories, and businesses, all using renewable electricity. We also have the educational system to train people to, for example, develop and spread energy storage and transmission technologies. What we’re missing is the collective imagination, the willingness to see that a different future is possible, and the guts to chart a different course.

This matters because people chronically underestimate our capacity for change. How many of us would have imagined, just fifteen years ago, that we would carry a device in our pockets that functioned as a phone, library, general store, newspaper, music repository, movie theatre, radio, alarm clock, health monitor, global map, tour guide, homing device, and, if you live in Vancouver, the key to hundreds of cars in a shared network? In January, who would imagined that in three months people would be quarantined in their homes, or that the oil supply would have outstripped demand?

Imagination alone will not save us from climate change. We need to be realistic. We are highly likely to see continued impacts from climate change for decades to come. We are unlikely to reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to avoid 1.5°C of global warming, the lower temperature threshold in the Paris Climate Agreement. Avoiding 2°C of global warming will also be a tremendous challenge. Regardless, the more we do to reduce emissions, the less the planet will warm, and the less that people will suffer. That’s the key message from the scientific community.

My instinct as a scientist is to talk about those numbers and data and equations. After all, I came to science as a vocation because I liked math and physics, and thought I could apply it to the world. Granted I also came to science, and I’m not the only one, as a way to hold onto my inner child, the one who looked up at the sky and wondered what was out there, and what was possible.

We need those imaginations now. We need to envision what the solutions will bring. Imagine a future with quiet and clean downtown streets, not because of a pandemic, but because electric vehicles produce little sound and little pollution. With cleaner and clearer skies, because we have eliminated smog generated from burning coal and other fossil fuels. With birds chirping, because we have restored landscapes to uptake carbon from the atmosphere.

Most of the solutions to climate change also happen to make the world a healthier place for people. A safe, healthy place is what we all want right now.

The previous post explained the methods used in the estimates of Canada’s fair share of the remaining global carbon budget under different levels of global warming. Here I answer five frequently asked questions about the remaining budget that I received from representatives of the federal parties, students, colleagues, journalists, television hosts, camera operators, friends, family, angry eggs on twitter, etc. For more on this subject, I recommend my interview with BNN Bloomberg.

I start with a very important question that no one explicitly asked me.

Do you think the Canadian government should propose emissions targets consistent with avoiding 1.5°C of global warming?

No, I do not. I say this even though my scientific research provided part of the argument for the 1.5°C limit. I’ll explain.

The most common reaction I heard to the Policy Options article was that I was criticizing the federal parties for not setting targets and policies that help the world avoid 1.5°C or 2°C of warming. If you only read the headline, or only looked at the graph, that would be a fair reaction.

In the article itself, I was making a much more nuanced argument. The take-home is that, realistically speaking, it is too late for Canada to do its fair share to avoid 1.5°C of global warming. Doing so would take an incredibly sharp reduction in greenhouse gas emissions: a 96-99% drop below current levels by the year 2030.

No reasonable political party is going to suggest that. Nor do I think any party should. That dramatic of a drop in emissions would require upending the economy, not to mention our ability to power our homes, get around, and to grow food – agriculture is 10% of Canadian emissions. It could end up doing more harm than good. This is the same reason why many climate experts are uncomfortable with Extinction Rebellion’s call for net zero emissions by 2025.

If I had one core criticism of the Liberal, Green Party, and NDP platforms,* it was not that their policies and targets needed to be more aggressive. It was the repeated claim that they would make sure Canada does its fair share to avoid 1.5°C of global warming, despite scientists and others repeatedly showing that doing so is next to impossible for Canada (I wrote about this in Policy Options in 2016).

The claim betrayed either a weak understanding of the issue or a preference of symbols – 1.5°C as a symbolic goal – over reality. I would prefer that parties serious about addressing climate change be more transparent about the challenge that lies ahead.

* The Conservative Party platform was not serious enough about climate change to even quality for this criticism. I’m not being partisan: the plan did not have any numbers. Imagine preparing a financial budget, but without any numbers. Would an economist take it seriously?

Why is the emissions decrease in your 1.5°C scenario so much greater than what the IPCC reports?

The 2018 IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR1.5) reported that the world would need to reduce net emissions by 45% from 2010 levels by the year 2030 (with an uncertainty range of 40-60%). My estimated reduction for Canada (96-99%) is greater for two reasons: I use an equitable distribution of the carbon budget, and I do not consider negative emissions.

First, in order to estimate Canada’s fair share, I assigned Canada a share of the remaining global carbon budget pie based on our fraction of the world’s population. Since Canada is among the world’s highest emitters per person, an equitable slice of the future pie is much smaller than the mega-slice we are currently eating. That means reducing emissions much faster than developing countries with lower than average emissions per person.

Second, my analysis is based on total cumulative emissions remaining (for a two-thirds chance of limiting warming to a certain level). The 45% reduction often quoted from SR1.5 is based on net emissions, which refers to the actual emissions minus negative emissions – carbon dioxide permanently removed from the atmosphere by human activity. If Canada is to successfully deploy negative emissions techniques and technologies, the remaining budget would be larger and the rate of actual emissions cuts could be less steep.

These two differences notwithstanding, my analysis is actually conservative in that it uses a generous interpretation of the carbon budget. The SR1.5 provides an uncertainty range for the remaining global carbon budget (see Chapter 3, Table 2.2). As mentioned in the methods post, the values I used represent the high end of that range. If I had used the middle of the range, the budgets would all have been smaller (e.g., the remaining budget for a two-thirds chance of avoiding 2°C of global warming would be 8% smaller).

Are there any ways to increase Canada’s carbon budget?

Technically, yes. As mentioned above, the estimated remaining carbon budget for Canada could be increased through negative emissions, including land carbon uptake or direct air capture technology.

We can also increase the budget through purchasing credits on an international carbon market. The cost would not be trivial. For example, the gap in the year 2030 between Canada’s emissions target and mean trajectories consistent with a likely chance (66%) of limiting warming to 1.5°C is 495 Mt CO₂e. If Canada made up the difference by buying credits at a price of $50/t CO₂e, the cost in the year 2030 alone would be $25 billion, excluding inflation. Using the 2030 emissions gap for 2°C of 260 Mt CO₂e, the cost would be $13 billion in the year 2030 alone.

While that outlay of money may be unrealistic, some purchasing of emissions credits is likely to happen. There is not, as of yet, a carbon trading method under the Paris Climate Agreement, but there are other carbon markets. The federal government expects to achieve some of the planned emissions cuts for 2030 through credits purchased from the Western Climate Initiative (WCI), a carbon market created by western U.S. states of which Quebec is a member and pre-Doug Ford Ontario was a member. The 2018 modelling estimated 13 Mt CO₂e of credits from the WCI.

What if Canada claimed a larger share of the remaining global carbon budget?

To answer this question, I took an intermediate approach to determining Canada’s portion of the remaining budget, halfway between the population-based approach I used in the past analysis (0.49%) and one based on today’s fraction of the world’s emissions (1.59%). With this intermediate approach, the estimated future emissions budgets and trajectories shift such that the 1.5°C case is similar to the previous 2°C case (from the population-approach), and the 2°C case is similar to the previous 3°C case. For example, the 1.5°C trajectories using the intermediate approach involve reducing emissions by 65-72% by the year 2030.

Keep in mind, as I argue in the article and is apparent in the latest UN Emission Gap Report, it is hard to envision how the world could realistically avoid 2°C or 3°C of global warming, let alone 1.5°C of global warming, if countries like Canada claim a portion of the budget very disproportionate to their population.

How confident are scientists in the global carbon budget numbers?

There is a substantial uncertainty in budget estimates and new research is published every month or two that revises previous estimates. Glen Peters wrote a helpful perspective in Nature Geoscience on the nuance of carbon budget analyses, and the implications for policy.

On a most basic level, the uncertainty comes from the basic irreducible uncertainties in climate science. Due to the complexities and the path dependence of the climate system, science can provide a range, not an exact value, for how responsive the global average temperature is to an increase in carbon dioxide concentrations. It makes sense that there is no one correct estimate of the remaining carbon budget.

The SR1.5 carbon budgets used here were larger than in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, because the SR1.5 used recent observations of warming to inform models. There was “high agreement” in SR1.5 that the remaining budget is larger than estimates presented in that earlier report. At the same time, the SR1.5 may overestimate the remaining budget, because constraining the budget based on observations will omit the effect of carbon feedbacks like permafrost melting on the relationship between carbon emissions and eventual peak warming. In addition, all CO₂-only emissions budgets tend to be overestimates because they don’t account for projected decreases in aerosols, which will increase future warming. For the latest on estimating the remaining carbon budget, I recommend this accessible article by scientists Joeri Rogelj and Piers Forster.

In an article published in Policy Options before Canada’s federal election, I described future greenhouse gas emissions pathways that would give Canada a chance of doing its fair share to avoid different levels of global warming (see figure). This post explains the methods used in that analysis. A second post answers frequently asked questions about the analysis.

For this work, I developed a range of future greenhouse gas emissions trajectories for Canada that are consistent with the proposed different temperature limits. The analysis follows from the commonly used “cumulative emissions” framework. The cumulative CO₂ emissions over time can roughly predict the amount of long-term warming of the climate system.

Cumulative remaining CO₂ budgets consistent with a likely (67%) chance of avoiding 1.5°C of warming are available in Chapter 2 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (Table 2.2). In order to conservative, I used the values for the upper end of the uncertainty range. The remaining carbon budget for 3°C and 4°C were computed using the relationship between remaining carbon budget and mean temperature change in Table 2.2 (for the upper end of the uncertainty range: remaining budget = [1500 *Warming level] – 1680).

Calculating Canada’s portion of the remaining budget

The next step was to apportion some of that remaining carbon budget to Canada. I calculated the remaining budget for Canada based on Canada’s current fraction of the world’s population (0.49%, based on latest available data from Statistics Canada and the CIA World Factbook). An alternative approach would have been to apportion the budget based on Canada’s fraction of the world’s emissions (1.59%, based on most recent five-year average of CO₂-only emissions from the Global Carbon Project). See an earlier analysis and article in Policy Options for a comparison of these approaches.

Why use the population approach here? Two reasons – one ethical, and one practical. A core principle of international climate agreements is that the developed world, which is historically more responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, should take the lead in reducing emissions. This is the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities.” Second, even if you reject the above principle, an equitable distribution may be the only one that works.  As I mention in the Policy Options piece, if high-emitting countries like Canada claim a portion of the carbon budget based on their current emissions, rather than their population, there will be little space for the developing world. It is not a tenable approach to staying within the budget. This is a collective action problem: sure, countries like Canada could argue we need a greater slice of the pie in order to sustain our economy, but if we do so, the world is unlikely to stay within the budget.

The IPCC budget values were computed for January 1, 2018 onwards. Since emissions data is not yet available for 2018 and 2019, I estimated the remaining budgets for Canada assuming CO₂ emissions in 2018 and 2019 were the same as 2017, the most recent year with data currently available (Canada’s 2017 National Inventory Report). Values excluding emissions from land use, land use change, and forestry were used, following convention in federal government calculation of the future emissions targets and in national reports to the United Nations.

Calculating the future emission trajectories

I calculated the future emissions trajectories using logistic or S-shaped curves, as in the previous report (pdf) and in most research on future emissions trajectories over the past decade. Multiple possible trajectories consistent with each emissions budget were created by varying the year that emissions begin to decline (lag of 0-10 years) and varying the parameter t₀ in the logistic equation below (from 2050 to 2190, with increments of 20 years).

With each set of assumptions, the equation was solved iteratively for k such that the cumulative emissions by year were equal to the available budget. This method created up to 36 possible trajectories for each temperature limit. The number of compatible trajectories is higher for higher temperature limits (1.5°C – 14 trajectories, 2°C – 21 trajectories, 3°C – 30 trajectories, 4°C – 36 trajectories) because of the greater possible time lags and later midpoints.

The final step was scaling the CO₂ emissions trajectories to trajectories for all greenhouse gas emissions (i.e., CO₂-equivalent, including methane and other gases) so that the results are comparable to Canada’s emissions targets and federal policy proposals – all of which focus on total greenhouse gas emissions or CO₂e. I scaled each of the trajectories from CO₂-only to CO₂-equivalent by assuming that CO₂ emissions will continue to represent 79.8% of all Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, the value for 2017.

The assumption is reasonable given that CO₂ has represented a consistent fraction (79.0%-80.6%) of total Canadian greenhouse gas emissions since 2005, Canada’s baseline for policy. It is important to note that this simple linear scaling comes with caveats: it ignores the effect of the different residence time of gases like methane and of likely future reduction in aerosol cooling on the size of the remaining greenhouse gas budget (see SR1.5, Chapter 2, Section 2.2.2.2).

Finally, the figure shown above and that appears in Policy Options presents the 5^th to 95^th percentile range from the computed greenhouse gas emissions trajectories (in CO₂e) for each of the temperature limits.

Up next: Frequently Asked Questions on Canada’s remaining carbon budget

I recently answered a series of very good questions about Kiribati’s struggle against climate change for the French photojournalism outlet Rendez Vous Photos. Here is an abridged version of the original English answers:

How long have you been studying Kiribati and why did you choose this country?

I have been studying the effects of climate change in Kiribati since 2005. Kiribati is incredibly unique. Like neighbouring Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands, Kiribati is existentially threatened by sea-level rise. It also has a very unusual climate experience. Thanks to El Niño events, Kiribati experiences more frequent ocean “heat waves” than almost any other country in the tropics. It is therefore an ideal place to evaluate how coral reefs – which provide food for the i-Kiribati and protect the shoreline from rising seas – will respond to rising ocean temperatures.

When do you plan to go there in the future?

My students and I are planning a field trip next spring. We will talk with local people, share our findings, and work with my local colleagues to measure recent changes in the coral reefs and water temperatures.

What are the real threats due to climate change?

Rising seas are reshaping the islands by changing when and how sand and other material is deposited and eroded (see this article in Scientific American). So the islands may not “disappear,” as is usually reported in the media, however they may become prohibitively expensive to inhabit as high tides damage homes and infrastructure and salt water infiltrates the local water supply.

What about tropical cyclones?

Kiribati is lucky in this regard. As the country is close to the equator, there is not enough spin generated by the rotation of the Earth to generate cyclones. Only the outer islands further from the equator like Butaritari have ever experienced cyclones, and the last one was over a century ago.

What are the main resources of Kiribati?

Kiribati is a big country: 33 atolls and reef islands spread across an area of ocean the size of India. Its main resource and source of government income is fishing, particularly revenue from tuna licenses. Families depend heavily on local resources, including agricultural products, especially coconuts, and coral reef resources like fish.

You describe the population as “resilient.” What do you mean by this?

There is no doubt that the future of Kiribati and its people are at risk due to climate change. Yet the people and the islands are much more resilient than stories and images in the media would have you think. The foreign journalist’s or activist’s story about helpless people being swallowed by the sea say more about foreigners’ preconceptions of Kiribati and the Pacific Islands than it does of actual Pacific people. If you go to Kiribati for a week or two with an expectation of seeing “suffering” people, that is what you will find. But if you spend more time to really get to know the culture and the history, you will find an incredibly resilient people who have managed to thrive for centuries. Traditionally, i-Kiribati saw themselves as rich, thanks to the bountiful ocean. The more recent narrative of vulnerability arose from colonialism, a greater reliance on imported food (in the capital of Tarawa), and the need to appeal to the world for action on climate change. As my former student Sophie Webber has written, vulnerability is “not a latent condition, but rather, an emergent effect.”

Why is it so important to talk about climate immigration and not climate refugees?

It is about dignity. The word refugee implies helplessness. The i-Kiribati are not helpless. They are looking for respect, and for assistance in managing a future made extremely difficult because of climate change. That means building populations of i-Kiribati people in other countries so that if the day comes that people do have to leave their home, the migrants could join an existing expatriate community rather than be treated as refugees.

You studied an old Kiribati migration to the Solomon Islands. How can this period of history help today?

During British colonial times, a number of families were resettled in the Solomon Islands due to concerns about droughts at home. My research with those people and their descendants revealed that even 60 years later, there are still issues surrounding rights to the land and equality in their adopted home. Their experience serves as a cautionary tale for policymakers planning community resettlements due to climate change.

Can the impacts of climate change be postponed by building protection against the tides or by bringing sediment to raise the levels of the islands?

Hard protection methods like sea walls can reduce flooding from higher tides but only if they are very carefully designed. Most designs only worsen erosion and exacerbate the problems. To really adapt to rising seas, you need to take actions that will expand and raise the land. It is technically possible – this is what China is doing to the islands in the South China Sea. However, as the sea level rises, this becomes more and more expensive, and the resources may not be available in Kiribati. And this will not be feasible in Kiribati – or in the South China Sea – later this century if we do not take action to slow the rate of climate change.

How can other countries help? What should they avoid doing?

Kiribati would benefit the most from efforts that build the capacity of the local people to tackle these problems. Success will not come from single land purchases, splashy one-time foreign investments, or limited-term aid projects. It will come from years of trial and error and consistent, long-term investment by the international community in implementing solutions tailored to specific locales. If you want to help Kiribati, you cannot just visit once or make a one-time offer of funding; you need to stay engaged and really work with the local people.

In conclusion, can you tell us if you are pessimistic or optimistic for their future?

I am optimistic about the Kiribati people. They are strongly tied to their communities and will do what is necessary to maintain their culture in Kiribati or in new adopted homes. The rest of the world needs to see them as real people, not as narrative devices used to lobby for climate action, even if that is done with with good intentions!