‘Globalisation’ could worsen CO2 pollution

PARIS: The shift of low-value, energy-hungry manufacturing from China and India to coal-powered economies with even lower wages could be bad news for the fight against climate change, researchers cautioned on Monday.

As Asias giants move up the globalisation food chain, many of the industries that helped propel their phenomenal growth -- textiles, apparel, basic electronics -- are moving to Vietnam, Indonesia and other nations investing heavily in a coal-powered future.

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, global warming has been caused mainly by burning oil, gas and especially carbon-rich coal.

"This trend may seriously undermine international efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions," said Dabo Guan, a professor of climate change economics at the University of East Anglia in Britain and co-author of a study in Nature Communications.

"The carbon intensity of the next phase of global economic development will determine whether ambitious climate targets such as stabilising at two degrees Celsius will be met," he told AFP. The 196-nation Paris climate treaty, which goes into effect in 2020, calls for capping global warming at "well under" 2 C, and 1.5 C if possible.

Global temperatures have already risen a full degree Celsius since the mid-19th century, enough to disrupt weather patterns and boost deadly storms, droughts and floods. Scientists have roughly calculated the amount of fossil fuels humanity can burn without exceeding those limits. On current trends, this "carbon budget" will be used up in a matter of decades and Earth will likely hot up another two or three degrees by centurys end.

The study, led by Jing Meng at the University of Cambridge, details a "new phase of globalisation" in which trade between developing countries expanded three times faster from 2005 to 2015 than international trade as a whole, which grew by 50 percent.

In 2014, this so-called "South-South" trade stood at $9.3 trillion. "The early-production stages of many industries have relocated from China and India to lower-wage economies, a trend that has accelerated since the global financial crisis of 2008." The ability to reign in global warming, he warned, may depend on curbing the growth in coal-based energy in countries poised to take off by filling this link in the supply chain.