North Korea s Climate Co- operation Dr Benjamin Habib

Transcription

1 North Korea s Climate Co- operation Dr Welcome to Asia Rising, a podcast of La Trobe Asia where we examine the news, views and general happenings of Asia's States and Societies. I'm your host and with me today is Dr a lecturer in International Relations at La Trobe University. Hello to you Ben, thanks for joining me. Dr Hi Matt, thanks for having me in. Today we're going to examine North Korea's compliance with the UNFCCC, their approach to climate change and what their real motivations could be in engaging in such a broad thinking arena. Ben if you could explain broadly what the UNFCCC is, what it hopes to achieve and where North Korea falls within that sort of interaction. Well the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is really the centrepiece of the international response to climate change in terms of mitigating greenhouse gas pollution and adapting to the impacts of climate change. It's an international treaty, it's setup as a Framework Convention Model, so you've got a shell, a legal shell with not much in the way of hard legal obligations on signatories but over time, the parties to the treaty would negotiate harder legal mechanisms to flesh out the skeleton of the treaty, so to speak. Now it's usually the big players in international climate politics that are most involved in this negotiating process and because the treaty regime has so many parties, you know almost 200 signatories, they tend to negotiate in blocks (in groups), to make the process a little bit more streamlined. So for North Korea, North Korea has a really small carbon footprint. It's not heavily involved in the negotiating process, I think they've sent delegates to the Conference of Parties meetings for this maybe 3 or 4 times from 19 meetings. So they're very small player in the overall treaty regime. But generally if you comply with the treaty you get incentives and there's a reporting line on it, so this is a valuable conduit of that sort of information coming out of North Korea as well isn't it? Yeah, yeah that's right. So if you're a signatory to the treaty you have reporting requirements where you have to provide regular updates of data and other information on the policy measures you're undertaking and there's a very clear methodology for signatory states that they have to follow in these reporting requirements and North Korea's submitted 2 lengthy national communications to this treaty. The first one published in 2004 was very poor in terms of the information it had. The data inside was really outdated, so from the Soviet Era information, so was essentially useless as a reporting document. But their 2013 second national communication, much better, much more reliable information, although you have to add the caveat that 'any data coming out of North Korea has

2 question marks over it', but over the last 10 years through the UNFCCC and other international environmental treaties, gives us a window into the North Korean Government's picture that we might not otherwise have had if they weren't participating in these treaty regimes. So let's wade into what they're trying to address in North Korea then, what kind of climate challenges are they encountering in their country? Well, Korean Peninsula like a lot of North East Asia is experiences changes to its hydrological profile, so the amount of rainfall it gets when it gets the rainfall. So the summer months is when North Korea would expect to get most of its rain through the East Asian Monsoon. Climate change is changing that picture so you're getting less overall rainfall through the summer, but you're getting it in more concentrated heavy dumping events which exacerbates any potential flood risk. That flood risk is exacerbated by the poor adaptive capacity of the country and some of the poor land management and environmental policy decisions that the North Korean governments made over several decades. So you put those two together and North Korea has a fairly significant climate vulnerability profile. And with the desire that North Korea has to be self- sufficient in terms of its resources, this is a real challenge that's facing how to increase its food stock and intake and how to provide infrastructure like power, isn't it? Yeah, it's a country that's permanently on the breadline, it's in permanent food insecurity. Partially that's because it s a country with only about 17% arable land. So it doesn't have a lot of land to farm to grow food for its citizens, it s a very mountainous place. But also, through government policy choice, they're unwilling to engage with international markets to actually buy food, but also they're unable because they don't make a whole lot or produce a whole lot that they could trade on international markets to get the foreign currency to buy food. So what sort of windfalls are they getting through complying with the UNFCCC? Clearly the incentives are enough, so what are they getting out of it? Well, like a lot of small countries that are involved in the treaty, they're free- riding on it for capacity building assistance. So they haven't got a big carbon footprint or anything like that, but it's going to give them clear benefits? Yeah, they're in it for the goodies, it's a very instrumental participation and that participation fits very well with the government's economic development goals. To realise those goals they need to upgrade their energy infrastructure and they need to improve their agricultural productivity. In energy for example, you can get a lot of assistance from the treaty and particularly from the

3 Clean Development Mechanism for hydro- power. So North Korea being a mountainous country there's lots of streams. North Korea has been using dams for a long time for hydro- power but it's very old Soviet era technology so the capacity building assistance through the UNFCCC allows foreign investors to come in and set up new technology hydro power plants and upgrade that infrastructure. Also in wind and solar technology, there's opportunities for that to be rolled out a bit further but so far we've only seen very small scale localised projects and we haven't seen mass rollout around the country. What's their motivation behind doing this really? I mean there's obviously going to be a propaganda windfall? There's probably not going to be a lot of desire to address climate change but if North Korea had better food security, if they were more self- sufficient in power generation do you think they would be engaging at all with the UNFCCC or would they be a lot more closed off or self- sufficient, ('We're doing fine thanks, the environment's your problem and you're doing, off you go the rest of the world')? I mean it's hard to say, to answer that hypothetical, but let's think. A lot of their trade opportunities are closed off because of the International Sanctions regime. So that very much limits the kind of economic interactions they can have and their opportunity to bring technologies in from other countries. So free- riding on environmental treaties gives them a chance to get this tech, to get the knowledge base and the assistance to do some of the upgrades to the energy infrastructure for example, that they can't really get from other sources. And for the agricultural sector, improving land management techniques, improving productivity through things like double cropping or seed raising or boosting soil fertility. The kind of knowledge and skills and technology that they need to do this is not readily available from other sources so it s a very instrumental co- operation. But without the incentives, do you think there would be compliance at all? Probably not. How is their compliance viewed then outside North Korea? So you've gone over to South Korea quite a lot and you've talked to the people who are involved in this kind of work over there. What's the kind of feeling on the ground? I don't think other countries particularly care, because North Korea's such a small player. Yeah. In terms of South Korea, there's restrictions on the South Korean government (partially for ideological reasons), because on the conservative side of politics in the South particularly, they see any form of engagement with the North as a kind of appeasement. So they're very reticent to

4 engage with whatever it is. Even for something like environmental co- operation which is less politicised than other forms of engagement. But also there's a concern that the North Korean military could divert some of this assistance for its own use, so anything to do with energy is a big concern in Seoul that the military will co- opt that technology. Also food production concerns that the military will co- opt whatever productivity gains are made for its own consumption at the expense of the people and propping up the government. The only environmental co- operation of an inter- Korean level that's taking place is reforestation, I mean it's pretty hard for the military to co- opt a tree. But reforestation is really important given the damage of past land practices and natural disaster events on the agricultural sector. With the incentives that they're getting and they're, can we say maybe 'patchy reporting', is there a lot of accountability of how they're using any incentives that they're getting? Yes there is, particularly through the assistance they've got through the Clean Development Mechanism which is a technology transfer and development vehicle that was set through the Kyoto protocol which was negotiated into the UNFCCC in The idea of the Clean Development Mechanism is that a non- Annex 1 country like North Korea, so a developing county, can access development funding and technology from an entity in a developed country who'll invest in a project in North Korea. North Korea gets a project that will reduce its emissions profile and help its development activities, the foreign entity will get to write off some of its own carbon pollution with carbon credits that are generated out of the project in North Korea and the North Korean government gets any revenue that s generated through those carbon credits on international markets. There's two interesting points here, one is that you could have foreseen the North Korean government really steaming forward with more CDM projects over time if the international carbon price had stayed higher than it is, so when they initiated these projects in 2008 to 2011 the carbon price was around 6 per ton, now it's down to about 20 cents. Wow. There's a big change. The economic incentives for investors and the North Korean government have evaporated so we're not likely to see more CDM projects in the foreseeable future while the price is so low. But in terms of oversight and reporting, to get a CDM project off the ground there's a quite stringent methodology that has to be overseen by an independent organisation. They do a lot of site visits, they do interviews and they've got to ensure that the counting of the carbon credits and the greenhouse gas savings that are made on the project are legitimate. Because there's a lot of money riding on it, so in that sense the CDM reporting is a very rich source of information on these local projects, it doesn't say much about the broader country but in terms of the sites where the projects are at, it's quite interesting reading. So some crystal ball gazing then from you. If North Korea say somehow would become self- sufficient and would find themselves in less need of these incentives, do you think that they would

5 disengage their efforts or do you think there would be enough of a desire, that there's enough propaganda windfall for them to continue addressing climate change issues? Well that would depend on how successful the treaty regime is. So if there's real momentum to transform this into something that addresses social justice concerns, as a lot of the non- Annex 1 parties are hoping, then there's probably going to be more incentives for the North Koreans to stay involved. The international carbon price - where that's at, that will also be an influence. But in the end I don't think North Korea's going to be self- sufficient in food anytime soon and will still need a lot of assistance in the energy sector for some time to come so the incentive structure that's got them involved in the treaty is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future so it will be interesting to see how this plays out. Ok we'll leave it there for today, thanks for your time today Ben. Thanks Matt. That's it today for Asia Rising, the podcast from La Trobe Asia. If you like this podcast you can subscribe on itunes or Soundcloud. You can follow Ben on twitter, and thanks for listening.