The climate consensus is rapidly unravelling. With the developing world consistently failing to make the level of commitment required to prevent global warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, we need to think differently about achieving sustainable development. Could we apply DPI Thinking to this problem?

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It is unreasonable to expect developing countries to commit to costly climate mitigation strategies when the only reason developed nations are where they are is that they used cheap polluting technologies to get there. Having said that, global warming is real, and unless all countries commit to a more climate-friendly approach, we will have no hope of fighting it.

This is why, for the past three decades, the climate consensus has been that developed countries will bear the brunt of the cost that poorer countries will have to incur if they are to adopt the expensive green solutions that the world needs them to. However, with the US leaving the Paris Agreement, the old compact is unravelling quickly. We need a new approach—one that developing countries can adopt without having to depend on the whims of the developed world.

The Climate Consensus

At the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was formally adopted, the countries of the world agreed to meet annually at a conference of parties (or COP) to assess their progress towards their climate objectives. This led to the adoption, in 1997, of the Kyoto Protocol, the first global agreement among all nation-states to legally bind themselves to reduce carbon emissions for the sake of future generations. It imposed common but differentiated obligations, with an obligation on industrialized nations to cut emissions by as much as 5% below 1990 levels.

As it happens, the Kyoto Protocol failed to achieve what it set out to do. In 2015, it was replaced by the Paris Agreement. Under this revised agreement, all countries were expected to participate, and once they had set their climate targets, they were obliged to report these nationally determined contributions (NDCs) regularly. A climate fund with a target corpus of an annual $100 billion  was set up with contributions expected from developed countries that would be used to help developing countries address climate mitigation and adaptation challenges.

Though over 70 countries pledged to achieve carbon neutrality and many have updated their NDCs over the past decade with increasingly ambitious targets, the world is still on track for 2.4° to 2.7° Celsius of warming—well above the Paris target of no more than 1.5° over pre-industrial levels. The climate fund remains underfunded, and since much of the funding was provided as loans, not grants, it has increased the debt burden of the developing countries that availed of them.

A DPI Reset

This year, as COP returns to the country where global discussion on climate first began, it does so at a particularly challenging time in its history. With the world’s biggest economy and largest polluter having decided to walk away from its commitments, it is clear that the Paris Accord, like the Kyoto Protocol before it, has not worked. It is time for a reset. If we can no longer rely on developed countries to help with mitigation and adaptation, we need to build the tools to do it ourselves.

I have previously written about how the principles of digital public infrastructure (DPI) could be used to address mitigation and adaptation challenges. I discussed how it could help us approach an energy transition differently. While everyone agrees that in order to reduce carbon emissions, the world needs to transition to renewable sources of energy, it is not easy to integrate distributed and renewable sources of energy into a grid that is not designed to deal with variable sources of energy supply. The Digital Energy Grid offers a potential solution—a way to tap rooftop solar, vehicle storage and other distributed energy assets to meet the variable demands of an increasingly power-hungry world.

Then there is Brazil’s rural environmental registry, a national digital infrastructure programme that offers farmers a digitally certifiable record of their compliance with applicable land-use obligations that has been verified using satellite data. This not only ensures that the farmer’s produce can be certified as “deforestation-free,”  as required under new EU regulations, but also provides evidence of the country’s compliance with its climate obligations. If this solution can be deployed in other countries and modified to suit their climate objectives, it could offer a cost-effective solution that would help meet land-use mitigation obligations.

This same approach could help countries adapt to climate change. Those looking to promote the principles of a circular economy in various sectors can significantly accelerate their achievement of objectives by appropriately deploying DPI solutions. In India, a pilot is underway to leverage open network protocols to solve the complex logistical challenges of connecting diverse producers of farm stubble with factories where this agricultural waste can be converted into sustainable fuel. Similar solutions can be used to support and scale other use cases for a circular economy.

Taking Back Control

DPI thinking offers us a path to climate resilience that doesn’t depend on the whims of wealthy nations or their fickle politics. If we can learn to build population-scale solutions that enable sustainable development from the ground up, developing countries will be able to take control of the climate narrative. It is time for those who bear the least responsibility for the climate crisis that we find ourselves in to lead the way in demonstrating how it can be mitigated.

The future of our planet will not be dictated by what the developed world did, but by what the developing world will do.