What would it mean to treat climate change as an ‘emergency’?
To help understand whether climate change is now an emergency, it helps to first understand what it means to treat something as ‘an emergency’?
An emergency is a situation where the normal ways we manage society and the economy cannot adequately deal with the risk we face. It implies therefore a change to what we do, commensurate to both the scale and urgency of the risk.
Declaring an emergency should result in the development of a plan, underpinned by strong leadership that communicates, coordinates and deploys the practical capacity and financing to protect communities from the threat, including the most vulnerable. In most emergencies, only the state has the authority and capacity to act in this way. The community relies on the state to do so.
This is well understood from other emergency responses, where the practical process of managing an emergency is widely known. In these cases we have various mechanisms and legal frameworks in place with which to act. Including:
localised emergencies like bushfire, earthquake, flood and terrorist attacks;
regional emergencies like famine and war and
more global emergencies like WWII and the 2008 financial crises.
From these, we know the basic characteristics of an emergency response. As The Breakthrough Climate Centre describes it: “In emergency mode we stop ‘business-as-usual’ because nothing else matters as much as the crisis. We don’t rush thoughtlessly in, but focus on a plan of action, which we implement with thought, and all possible care and speed, to protect others and get to safety.”
The Breakthrough Climate Centre continues, using the comparison to WWII: “A ‘whatever it takes’ attitude means that government plans and directs the nation’s resources and capacity towards building up the war effort. This can be done at amazing speed.”
For example in WWII military outlays as a proportion of national economies grew from less than 2% pre-war to around 37% of GDP by 1945 in the USA (the GDP increased itself by 75% in that time, making the observed increase even more dramatic) and from 2.5% to 52% of GDP in the UK. These enormous economic shifts happened in less than a decade.
An emergency response only implements a ‘whatever it takes’ approach commensurate in scale and resources to the level of threat and urgency. The response to local flooding is naturally of a different scale to a war.
This then leads us to compare the level of risk posed by climate change with the current response to that risk. And to ask the question: ‘Should climate change now be considered as The Climate Emergency’? Does the evidence really support such an approach?
In doing so, we need to clearly differentiate that question from either the political/rhetorical process of ‘declaring’ an emergency or actually having a practical ‘emergency response’ in place. Both of those are also important, but first we need to consider whether the evidence confirms climate change is ‘an emergency’. Does the evidence really support such an approach?
This should be considered as a rational, analytical question, not one of advocacy, belief or ideology. It is a judgement, to be made ultimately by those in authority, on:
The scale, timing and level of threat or risk; and
The speed of response required to address it effectively.
Both of these criteria need to be considered, because an emergency response can, by definition and intent, be very disruptive to the status quo. So even if the risk is very high, an emergency response would not be justified if there is time to address that risk through the normal processes of policy and markets. Likewise, if the risks are manageable and can be adapted to effectively, then the disruption of an emergency response may again not be justified.
Therefore, an emergency approach is justified only if:
The risk is high; and
The consequences of failure are unmanageable or unacceptable, and
There is a time constraint governing whether a response will be effective.
In the context of knowing how disruptive treating something as an emergency can be, we can now ask the questions outlined above, in respect to climate change.
Is the threat large enough and the required response urgent enough, to justify a genuine emergency response?