THE TIMES KUWAIT REPORT
People around the world, especially those living in small Island-nations, low-lying areas, and in arid regions, all of whom are likely to be the earliest victims of climate change repercussions, are pinning their hopes on the COP26 gathering, currently underway in the Scottish city of Glasgow in the United Kingdom. The outcome of this UN conference will have far-reaching consequences for these people, as well as for people everywhere around the world.
In this regard, it was reassuring to find that Kuwait remains committed to lowering its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and encouraging afforestation drives, in a bid to reduce risks and increase resilience to climate change. Speaking at the United Nations COP26 conference in Glasgow last week, His Highness the Amir Sheikh Nawaf Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah’s representative His Highness the Prime Minister Sheikh Sabah Al-Khaled Al-Hamad Al-Sabah, announced Kuwait’s keenness to adopt a national low carbon strategy until 2050.
Elaborating on the state’s national strategy for tackling climate change, the prime minister said that it is based on developing a circular carbon economy that promotes reduction, disposal, reuse and recycling of greenhouse gases. He added that this strategy will be supported by the enactment of relevant legislation and laws to reduce emissions, and adapt to the negative effects of climate change at the national level, in line with local, regional and international environmental obligations.
Sheikh Sabah Al-Khaled also noted that Kuwait, in compliance with the Paris Climate Agreement signed in 2015, updated its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) document on 12 October, 2021. He affirmed that Kuwait attaches great importance to diversifying the country’s energy sources by introducing renewable energies, and replacing fossil fuels with liquefied gas in power stations to ensure the sustainability of energy supplies for future generations. The prime minister said that the package of development projects outlined in the revised NDC is based on a vision that would avoid an increase in greenhouse gases equivalent to 7.4 percent of its total emissions until 2035.
Kuwait has made enhanced climate resilience to improve community livelihood and achieve sustainability, the crux of its ‘National Adaptation Plan 2019-2030’, that the country submitted under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2019. The long-term National Adaptation Plan (NAP), prepared and published by Kuwait’s Environment Protection Authority (EPA), acknowledges that adapting to climate change is a core challenge facing Kuwait and its people.
The plan notes that being a largely arid land, Kuwait is among countries most affected by the negative impacts of climate change, and that the country is especially vulnerable to climate change related repercussions such as heat waves, rainstorms, and an increase in the number and intensity of dust storms, as well as the rise of sea level and its consequent impact on livelihoods, infrastructure projects and future long-term investment. The NAP proposed several medium and long-term strategies to increase resilience and build national capacities to address the risks and negative impacts of climate change.
The NAP, along with the initial Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) that Kuwait presented to the United Nations in 2015, form the cornerstone in the country’s policy framework to reduce the risks of, and increase resilience to, climate change, on a continuous basis. These two documents are the precursor on which the revised NDA that Kuwait submitted ahead of COP26 is based. Accordingly, the assertion by His Highness the Prime Minister at the Glasgow gathering that Kuwait’s revised NDA is based on a vision that would “avoid an increase in greenhouse gases equivalent to 7.4 percent of its total emissions until 2035,” deserves further reading.
Available data shows that though Kuwait’s share as a percentage of global emissions has remained at a relatively low 0.23 percent in recent years, its per capita annual emissions over the past five years have averaged over 23 tons per year. This is not only far higher than the per capita CO2 emissions of the top global emitters, such as China, the US, the EU or India, but also among the highest in the world. Only neighboring GCC state of Qatar, which leads in global per capita emissions at over 37 tons, has a higher annual per capita emission rate.
Also, Kuwait’s GHG emissions over the past five years, which has averaged around 96 million tons annually, places the country in the top quartile among 209 countries listed by Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) — an independent, global database of human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollution. Projecting the above figures over the next eight years to 2030, and based on the 7.4 percent reduction that Kuwait has committed to achieve in its revised NDC, would result in Kuwait having to avoid an increase of 57 million tons of GHG over the remaining eight years, or on average around 7 million tons annually until 2030.
To put this figure in perspective, the power industry in Kuwait emits around 48 million tons of CO2 annually, which is nearly half of all emissions in the country. Other industrial sources together release another 27 million tons, transport accounts for a further 13 million tons, non-combustion sources contribute 8 million tons, and buildings add a relatively low 600,000 tons of CO2 emissions annually.
In order to gain a better understanding of these emission figures, and the role that energy production plays in the country’s total CO2 emissions, we also need to differentiate between production- and consumption-based emissions. When countries set targets based on CO2 emission measurements they usually tend to focus on production-based emissions — the CO2 emitted within a country’s own borders. However, this fails to capture CO2 emissions from consumption of traded goods — goods that are produced elsewhere but are imported and consumed within a country’s borders.
In 2019, while Kuwait’s consumption-based emissions were 89.69 million tons, its production-based CO2 emissions were 96.65 million tons. Of the total production-based emissions, over 95 million tons (98%) came from the burning of oil and gas for energy production, and from flaring of waste gases; the remaining 1.6 million tons of emission came from other industrial production facilities.
Though Kuwait’s revised NDC does not go into details on which sectors or when they would begin cutting their emissions so as to meet the targeted figure by 2030, it is quite obvious that it will be quite a task. More than anything else, implementing the emission cuts needed to realize the target goal, would need per capita emissions to drop from the 26 tons emitted per person in 2019 to 17.5 tons per person by 2030, based on a projected population of 5.1 million people by then. Is this realistically achievable, or is it just another pipe-dream of our policymakers?
In his speech at COP26, His Highness the Prime Minister also highlighted Kuwait’s regional and international contributions to help preserve the environment and natural resources around the world. He pointed out that the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development (KFAED) had helped in mitigating the environmental repercussions resulting from the receding of the Aral Sea in Central Asia, and Lake Korley in Ghana, and the reduction of radiations resulting from the explosion of the Chernobyl reactor in the former Soviet Union in 1986. More recently, KFAED helped implement a project designed to reduce cross-border dust between Kuwait and Iraq, and which aims to reduce chances of their occurrence by nearly 40 percent.
While these international environmental initiatives are no doubt laudatory, more important is what Kuwait plans to do, to reduce emissions at home. In late October, while addressing the first Middle East Green Initiative Summit that was held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, His Highness the Crown Prince Sheikh Mishal Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah provided a little more clarity on how Kuwait plans to cut its emissions.
He said that Kuwait’s environmental strategy, which is integral to its vision of New Kuwait 2035 development plan, includes legislating environmental protection laws, rationalizing consumption of natural resources, reducing pollution rates, preserving integrity of the environment and protecting biodiversity, and improving waste management. In addition, the environmental sustainability plans also aim to enhance carbon-neutral pathways, establish terrestrial and marine reserves, rehabilitate oil sector facilities, improve energy efficiency, introduce renewable energies, and increase afforestation.
Elaborating on the Crown Prince’s statement, the Director-General of Kuwait’s Environment Public Authority (EPA) Sheikh Abdullah Al-Ahmad Al-Humoud Al-Sabah, speaking on the sidelines of the Saudi Green Initiative (SGI) Forum that opened a day earlier to the Middle East Green Initiative Summit, praised plans by Saudi Arabia to plant 10 billion trees across the kingdom in the coming decade. He added that Kuwait aims to integrate with Saudi Arabia in this regard, and work on increasing green areas in Kuwait so as to decrease the country’s carbon footprint, besides pursuing other projects aimed at “capturing CO2 and storing it in the soil”.
Reiterating the afforestation theme that appears to be dear to Kuwait, the Public Authority for Agriculture Affairs and Fish Resources (PAAFR) revealed in a statement that over the last few decades it has engaged in several projects aimed at spurring afforestation. PAAFR added that since the establishment of the country’s first nursery, the Al-Omariya Nursery in 1955, it has launched several projects that have seen millions of trees planted across the country, including more than 40,000 tamarisk shrubs in Al-Jahra, and similar projects launched in Al-Sulaibiya, Al-Wafra, and nearly 90,000 trees in an area behind Kuwait International Airport.
Incidentally, in many parts of the world, tamarisk shrubs and trees are considered an invasive species, as it has been found to deplete underground water resources, decimate the growth of other nearby plants by starving them of water, and to increase soil salinity. In Kuwait, which does not have any rivers or lakes, and where groundwater remains the only source of natural water, planting tamarisk trees is clearly not the best option.
According to the latest report published by the World Resources Institute (WRI) in 2019, Kuwait was placed seventh among 164 countries in terms of water stress. The WRI list, which ranked countries based on the level of their baseline water stress — a measurement of the ratio of total water withdrawals to available renewable surface and groundwater supplies — placed Kuwait along with 16 other countries in the extremely high risk category.
The recent Saudi Green Initiative conference had announced plans to plant as many as 50 billion trees across the Middle East, including 10 billion in Saudi Arabia, so as to contribute to cutting carbon emissions that result from hydrocarbon production in the region by more than 60 percent. These are undoubtedly ambitious goals, but it also needs to take into account the fact that 12 out of the 17 extremely high baseline water-stressed countries in the WRI list, are in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.
One only hopes that planting tamarisk and other high water absorbing trees are not part of the Saudi Green Initiative’s 50 billion afforestation drive. And that Kuwait, which is setting out on its own planting spree, will not include tamarisk and other tree species that further deplete Kuwait’s scarce groundwater supplies in its afforestation plans. Afforestation and other nature-based solutions to capture CO2 emissions, as well as unproven technologies that seek to remove CO2 and store them in hypothetical facilities for an undefined period of time, appear to be a favorite and recurring theme in the emission control plans advocated by many fossil-fuel rich countries.
With very few countries, including Kuwait and other oil producers, submitting credible plans and details on meeting their CO2 emissions at COP26, afforestation and other technological gimmicks appear to be nothing more than a fig leaf to cover their continued emissions from oil and gas production. But painting emission control plans with a broad brush is not limited to oil producers, the trend is widespread among many countries, including the world’s largest GHG emitters.
In the months leading to COP26, the United States and the European Union have promised to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050; China said it intends to embrace a net-zero target by 2060, and India proposes to achieve net-zero emissions by 2070. Not to be outdone, oil behemoths, and stalwarts from many other industries such as aviation, mining, finance, livestock and retail, have also joined the future net-zero bandwagon.
Many of the environmental promises by nations and multinationals are nothing more than an attempt at greenwashing — a public-relations or marketing ploy aimed at conveying the impression that an entity’s products or policies are environmentally friendly, but in reality are most often not. With net-zero targets set for decades ahead, without any near-term goals in between, governments have the leeway to wiggle out of having to make significant and probably unpopular emissions cuts at present. It also allows many multinationals to continue with a ‘business as usual’ approach to emissions in the short and near term.
As curtains draw to COP26 draw to a close on 12 November, it is obvious that the hopes people pinned on their leaders, to show real leadership at this crucial juncture in turning around global warming, were misplaced. Sadly, no matter what tactical successes are touted at the end of COP26, the results are likely to mark a strategic defeat for the planet and for people everywhere.