Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University, warned that authorities around the world are responding too slowly to the damage caused by weather disasters, despite an increase in their frequency.
African countries are among those feeling the effects of worsening extreme weather events. Photo: Reuters
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African countries are among those feeling the effects of worsening extreme weather events. Photo: Reuters
Instability caused by climate change could threaten democracies in the future, even if representative governments are best equipped to provide solutions, experts gathered at an annual conference argued.
The Athens Forum for Democracy, a United Nations-backed event, ended Friday in the Greek capital with a focus on the impact that rising temperatures and extreme weather could have on democratic stability.
Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University, warned that authorities around the world are responding too slowly to the damage caused by weather disasters, despite an increase in their frequency.
“As time goes on, the recovery interval gets smaller,” said Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences and international affairs and director of the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment at Princeton.
“We are in a situation where the services provided by governments – and one of the key services is the protection of life and limb – are not happening as they should. And in my opinion, this is not the case. “It’s just another pressure that’s going to happen on democracy,” he said.
The three-day event in Athens brought together leading academics as well as politicians and community project managers and took place as national authorities struggled to cope with widespread flooding in central Greece, weeks after the country suffered the worst wildfire on record.
Rising global temperatures and accelerating migration in some parts of the world have fueled fears that governments in coming decades will become more autocratic to maintain control of increasingly scarce resources and deal with civil unrest.
In the long run, that would be a bad idea, says Ann Florini, a fellow at the New America Political Reform Program, which is part of a U.S.-based think tank.
“Autocracy is the worst possible response to the climate emergency, because what you need is a lot of local accountability,” Florini said.
“They may be very good at building a big solar energy industry… but the idea that an autocracy will have the information systems, flexibility and resilience to deal with the climate emergency for future generations seems obvious to me. ridiculous.”
Only open societies, she insisted, could promote the systemic transformations of energy, agricultural and water systems, necessary because of their far-reaching ecological impact.
Daniel Lindvall, a senior researcher at the Department of Earth Sciences at Uppsala University in Sweden, said democratic governments must share the benefits of renewable energy with people at the local level.
“If you build a wind farm and some of the profits and profits go back to local communities, then you’ll have people supporting it instead of protesting against it,” he said.
“All the benefits of energy independence would then undermine the power of autocratic regimes like Putin (Russia) and Saudi Arabia.”
