NST Leader: Of wildfires and flash floods

New Straits Times

2 days ago

WILDFIRES in Europe to North America and floods in Asia are growing in intensity and frequency for the Earth to be a livable planet.
Forests that took decades to grow are wiped out in days. In Canada, wildfires begin to burn in places they didn't before: prairie provinces and the Atlantic region.
Local media reports quote experts as describing this as a new reality for Canada.
In Asia, it is a story of too much rainfall. Even living in the highlands isn't safe anymore as people in India and Pakistan are discovering.
In India-administered Kashmir, cloudbursts caused water bodies to swell, which in turn rolled boulders, in a river of sludge. Dozens are said to have died in the devastating flash floods.
A similar cloudburst in Kedarnath, Uttarakhand, in June 2013 is said to have killed more than 5,000 people in the worst flash floods in the country's history.
A study published in the Springer Nature journal on April 29, 2015 linked the flash floods to greenhouse gases.
The study went on to state that since the late 1980s, northern India has experienced huge rainfalls "tied to increased loading of greenhouse gases and aerosols".
In Pakistan, too, it was a tale of too much rainfall in its mountainous north, where 344 people lost their lives. June, July and August have been a picture of torrential rains and heatwaves for China, a sprawling landmass of a nation.
There, too, it was a story of devastating destruction for large swathes of land, which Reuters described as "a 1,400km arc".
The root cause? As climate scientists have long been saying: human-induced climate change. Studies by local climatologists, like the one in 2015, say the same.
But many world leaders, especially from the developed world, are not giving climate action the attention it deserves.
Some are even encouraging fossil fuel producers like Big Oil to abandon their net zero targets.
This will not only wreak havoc in vulnerable countries, but also be the cause of catastrophes in the very developed nations that are historic contributors to high carbon emissions.
Oil majors may blame their indifference on their governments, but the wrath of the shareholders are known to come down on the board and top management like cloudbursts.
As the recent landmark ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on climate change made clear, fossil fuel producers will be held to account, if not by their governments, most certainly by international law.
Big Oil and coal producing companies may think that the ICJ ruling is only an advisory opinion, not binding on them.
This will be a costly mistake in all senses of the word. For one, the ICJ decision is a restatement of international law as it is.
Secondly, the deluge of cases which are likely to follow the ICJ decision would demand too much of the top management's time, leaving little to spare for their business. Not to mention the reputational damage the cases will cause the companies.
The cases may not bring down governments, but if they ignore the wildfires and flash floods that are causing loss of lives and damage to property, their anger would surely be writ large on the ballot paper.