Áskoranir í umhverfismálum þróunarríkja

Magnús Jóhannesson, ráðuneytisstjóri umhverfisráðuneytisins, flutti erindi á ráðstefnu um mikilvægi vetnistækni fyrir sjálfbæra þróun sem fram fór í liðinni viku. Utanríkisráðuneytið, iðnaðar- og viðskiptaráðuneytið og umhverfisráðuneytið stóðu að ráðstefnunni í samvinnu við efnahags- og félagsmálaskrifstofu Sameinuðu þjóðanna. Markmið með ráðstefnunni var m.a. að ræða þýðingu vetnistækni fyrir þróunarríki og fulltrúar tuttugu þróunarríkja tóku þátt í ráðstefnunni. Erindið var flutt á ensku.

Your Exellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is an honor to address you here at the final session of this seminar on Hydrogen Economy for Sustainable Development.

Two of the biggest challenges that humankind faces in this century are to combat poverty and to protect our natural environment from ever increasing anthropogenic pressures. These two goals sometimes seem to be contradictory. Reducing poverty will mean increased economic activity, which has in the past meant pollution and damage to the environment. We do not, however, have to choose between these two goals. In fact, we have no choice: We must ensure that the push out of poverty will not lead to environmental catastrophe, as economic and social well-being is in the long term dependent on a healthy environment. We need the soil to produce food, clean water to drink, sewage-systems to prevent diseases in ever growing cities, forests and coral-reefs to nurture life on Earth. We don’t need a drastic change in climate, to cause droughts in bread-baskets, and the sea rising to inundate small islands and river deltas. We need sustainable development, not ecological ruin, that will erase any gains we might achieve in combatting poverty.

Sustainable development requires new thinking in many cases and new technology. Developing countries should look at ways to develop in a cleaner way than today’s developed countries, not only for the sake of the planet but also for their own sake; there is no need to repear polluting mistakes if they can be avoided. Developed countries have a duty to assist today’s developing countries to chart a cleaner and better road to development, not only for the sake of the planet, but for their own sake; pollution and environmental degradation in the South will affect the North as well.

Perhaps nowhere is the interdependence of developed and developing countries, and of humankind and nature, more evident than regarding climate change. The evidence that the planet is heating up is getting stronger. In the short term there will be winners and losers in a change of climate. Unchecked global warming will in the long term harm the vast majority of mankind.

The prospects for halting man-made climate change may seem daunting. China alone adds the equivalent of one big coal-burning power plant every week. The number of road vehicles may triple from today’s number of 750 million until 2050. Carbon emissions keep rising, now mostly from developing countries. Emissions per capita are still much higher in developed countries than in developing ones, and it is only fair that poor countries be given a chance to catch up with the rich world, and that rich countries lead the way in cutting emissions of greenhouse gases. This is acknowledged in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which states that countries have “common but differentiated responsibilities”.

Is there a cleaner path to development? Yes, there is, and I hope that you have during your stay here in Iceland had a glimpse of some of the technologies that we have developed for harnessing renewable energy. Many technologies already exist, that can and need to be more widely employed. Other climate-friendly technologies are around the corner, and need to be given a boost to become commercially viable and usable. It is crucial that new climate-friendly technologies be employed as widely as possible in the developing world, as there are almost two billion people without modern energy services today, and hundreds of million others are moing from poverty to sufficienty to prosperity.

Ignoring developing countries in the spreading of new climate-friendly technologies is unfair from a development perspective and highly unwise from an environmental perspective. The onus should therefore be upon transfer of new techology from the industrial countries to the developing countries. Capacity building in the developing countries in the field of climate-friendly technologies should also be matter of high priority.

Many sectors contribute to global warming – such as agriculture, deforestation, industry and waste management. The energy sector, including transportation, is, however, the main source of the seven billion tons of carbon emitted to the atmosphere each year by humans. Reducing the speed and intensity of climate change will require us to de-carbonize our energy system.

Here at this International Seminar on Hydrogen Economy for Sustainable Economy you have heard presentations on possible ways to achieve such de-carbonization. Iceland has made presentations at the Commission on Sustainable Development at its present cycle dealing with energy and climate issues, on geothermal energy and hydrogen, and we intend to present the results from this Seminar at the next session. There is a lot of exciting research and development in climate-friendly energy currently going on. It is vital that this technology should be owned and used as much as possible by developing countries. Some developments are encouraging: Brazil is a leader in biofuels; an Indian company is a leader in building wind turbines; Kenya is the country that currently installs most solar power systems per capita. But too often, developing countries face hurdles. Capacity to build and run power plants using new technologies is limited. Financing renewable energy plants is often difficult; diesel engines may be cheaper to buy than plants using local energy resources, while in the long-term the latter will be much more cost effective, when you count the price of the fuel in, let alone the environmental benefits. Financing institutions may prefer well-known fossil fuels plants to “exotic” technologies like solar or geothermal, even in areas where using these sources is cost-effective. All these obstacles have to be identified, analysed and overcome.

Iceland has contributed to a cleaner energy future inter alia by running a geothermal training programme for developing country experts for over twenty years. The idea behind this is that capacity building is crucial for the spread of cleaner technology. Geothermal is a tried and tested technology that could bring clean and reliable energy for perhaps hundred of millions of people who today either do not have access to electricity or rely on fossil fuels. The health of the planet demands that we remove present barriers to the deployment of geothermal and other renewable energy technology. I hope that this seminar, and the CSD will push that message strongly across to governments, industry and international financial institutions and regional development banks. Developing countries should not only be beneficiaries of “technology transfer”, but can and must be active partners in building a future that is clean and prosperous at the same time.

Thank you