domingo, 15 de outubro de 2017

BRICS: Different capacities of Adaptation to Global Warming

Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, by short, BRICS. They are known as the group of great Emergent Powers.

China, India and Russia are three great countries that share great importance in geopolitical terms. All three dominate the nuclear cycle and are respected by the fact that have nuclear weapons. All three have the weight of  milenar civilizations granting them a great dose of self respect. They are not newcomers in the international play, and formed a club with a reasonable degree of similitude among its members.


China exposes a GDP growth in 1990-2015 more than 7 per cent greater than the analogous world average as seen in Table 1. As indicated by the capacity to growth, it has the highest capacity of Adaptation to the Global Warming, as compared with India and Russia. Beside this, she has coal for hundred years ahead. It is so much coal that the atmosphere could not absorb all this quantity of carbon without inducing a huge impact on the Global Warming. The care for Adaptation is exposed in the white paper China’s Policies and Actions for Addressing Climate Change.


India is recovering from a lethargic era, at a steady pace. By this way it shows a good capacity for Adaptation to the Global Warming. Some of those who emit opinion about the Climate Change try to overestimate the contribution of India to the this phenomenon by stressing the gigantic number of cows, emitting the warming methane. But India has cows as always had in the past, when nobody would dream about Global Warming. As the life span of the methane is relatively short,  the stock of methane in the atmosphere that could be granted to India's cows could be taken as a constant. So, if this constant did not bring the Global Warming in the past, there no good reason to input India as contributing to the Global Warming by means of the methane expelled by its cows. There is a high return in pressuring India to increase costs to alleviate the global emission of warming gases, for the costs of an aggressive discourse by those most responsible for the Global Warming may be many times smaller than the costs of a measure of Mitigation that they should take, and instead, by means of pressure, get done by India. As a matter of fact India needs, according to a recent study one trillion dollars for Adaptation measures in the next 15 years.


Russia was always willing to have good relationship with the hegemonic forces of the North Atlantic community until its choice for what the Occident called the dictatorship of the proletariat. It solved itself the problem of remaining a free country even at a cost of millions and millions of its nationals. With the derrocade of its socialistic regime she lost power. His presently growth is according the world average, and the need for Adaptation is tempered by the gains in the extension of agricultural lands in Siberia. Russia recently has formally taken the Adaptation as a national government public policy.   

Brazil, somehow a nation of great area, without the deterrence power of having nuclear weapons, it is country which independency was declared by the representant of the of the colonial power, and which only one hundred years after the formal independence had the internal power moved by its national interests, became part of the select group of these three milenar culture nations. This is a unique  situation in the world. A nation that was declared independent to continue under the same colonial power. There is another unique situation, the racial spectrum. As a matter of fact a spectrum is an one dimension variable that continously change as you go through from one point to another. But a Brazilian physician in the important state of Minas Gerais (its importance can be induced by the fact that during half century the presidence of Brazil was alternated between the states do São Paulo and Minas Gerais, among more than 20 Brazilian states) made a revealing study on the racial composition of the individuals in Brazil. He captured the DNA information of the patients of his clinic that allowed to participate in the research and conclude that, with particular exceptions, in general all the white patients are mixed. As a general rule, those which family were not exclusively of recent immigrants, had European blood, but also some African ancestry and some local natives yellow blood. The mixed nation has, since 1988, a Constitution that  is a champion of human rights, but has failed to grow after the hegemony of the TIC technologies. The country has a national plan on Climate Change where the main direction exposed is Mitigation: "The goals set out in this plan are audacious, if compared with other countries. The potential of this Plan to the reduction of emissions of greenhouse gases is one of the largest – if not the largest – among all nations". Some day Brazil will wake up from his "splendid crib", sung in his national anthem, and will pay the due attention to the Adaptation, which is his true need.
 
South Africa, which openly stated apartheid hold up to the last decenial of the last century, is a two race society. Whites in the economic top. Blacks in the economic bottom. Even tough it has full intention of reaching an economic growth that could decrease the racial inequality, the results are backfiring, As Adaptation it may be said: "The reality is that there is limited water and fertile land resources, and there has been steady degradation of the environment and associated ecosystem resilience".

 Table 1  Great Economies out of the OECD Club

                       Relative        Área                Population          HDI
                     GDP yearly   1,000 km2       1,000,000 hab.
                    growth rate                               2015                2015
                    1990 - 2015*  

China                 7.12           9,597                1,379                .738
India                  2.48           3,287                1,324                .624
Russia                0.10        17,100                   144                .804
Brazil                -0.85          8,516                   206                .754

South Africa     -1.33           1,221                     55                .666

Sources: * Average PPP yearly GDP growth divided by the World GDP growth in
                international dollars as in the World Bank Database. 

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