By Eurasianet - Dec 09, 2024
Raekwon Chung, a Nobel laureate, advocates for a "me first" approach to climate action in Kazakhstan, emphasizing individual responsibility and grassroots initiatives.
Kazakhstan faces significant environmental challenges, including melting glaciers, rising heat waves, and water scarcity, making climate action a top priority.
The Association of Environmental Organizations of Kazakhstan (AEOK) plays a crucial role in raising awareness and promoting environmental initiatives, but more action is needed to achieve net-zero goals.
Kazakhstan needs a “me first” campaign to achieve its net-zero goal, Raekwon Chung told Eurasianet. The South Korean Nobel laureate believes action should start at the grassroots.
There are over 400 environmentally oriented non-governmental organizations in Kazakhstan, a country with a complex environmental history, including the scarring legacy of nuclear testing at Semipalatinsk. An estimated 75 percent of the country’s territory is vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change. Heat waves are intensifying. Glaciers are melting, with the Tuyuksu ice cap near Almaty projected to disappear by 2050. Water scarcity poses a rising threat to national security.
Against this backdrop, climate action has been propelled to the top of the government’s agenda, underscored by a 2020 pledge to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. Going green is now well underway. But the journey so far has been largely top-down.
“I don’t think nationally determined contributions work,” Chung said, referring to state-led efforts by individual countries to minimize national emissions under the 2015 Paris Agreement.
The Nobel laureate first visited Kazakhstan in 2007, the same year he won the Peace Prize, as part of an intergovernmental panel of experts on man-made climate change. Since then, South Korea’s first climate change ambassador has traveled to Central Asia multiple times. Most recently, he proposed making the Kazakh city of Alatau zero-carbon, a concept he is not yet allowed to discuss publicly because it has not been “officially accepted.” Chung chairs the board of trustees of the Association of Environmental Organizations of Kazakhstan (AEOK), an umbrella group that among other things runs an ongoing awareness campaign called “StopMusor” (“Stop Littering”).
“I am now promoting the bottom-up [approach] … Each individual has to share the responsibility,” Chung said in a Zoom interview from Seoul.
This stance is very much in line with the COP29 philosophy. At that Baku gathering, developed nations pledged to devote $300 billion a year annually to climate action in developing countries. At the same time, leaders of developed nations said the door was open for “everyone who can afford it” to join in.
“Organizations like AEOK can play a role in social education,” said Chung. Yet he believes that raising awareness is not enough. “To trigger real action, we need to design a [new] system” that shifts the focus from the state to individual consumers, he added.
AEOK brings together 143 environmental entities. Some, like “StopMusor,” are tapping into younger audiences and getting volunteers on board.
In 2020, it brought “The Sky Over Astana,” Saule Suleimenova’s creative installation, to Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city. The work featured 4,000 discarded bags glued together to create the impression of a watercolor painting.
It has also launched an interactive map to help people report environmental concerns, and popularizes waste separation. Other AEOK projects focus on biogas and humus production, or reversing land degradation.
Chung visited Astana on Nov. 21-23 for the Nobel Fest education forum and to promote the idea of a “me first” campaign, he said. In what sounds like a paraphrase of Donald Trump’s “America first” motto, the aim is to empower individuals to make their own green choices.
In May, a survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) found that some consumers are willing to pay an average of 9.7 percent more for sustainably produced or sourced goods.
Chung has his eye on these ambassadors of change. He believes that younger Kazakhs will be more attracted to companies that are carbon neutral. Businesses should recognize that they can make more money by using green energy and selling carbon-free products, he said. “It can be a marketing tool,” he added.
For AEOK, grassroots advocacy and social education is just one action track. Its other work includes analyzing how climate factors will change migration flows in Central Asia. This is part of a collaboration with the International Organization for Migration. By 2050, there could be as many as 2.4 million climate migrants in the region.
“Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan are also involved,” Aigul Solovyova, chair of the AEOK management board, told Eurasianet. Each country is working individually and preparing recommendations for their respective governments.
Kazakh researchers have been working in the mountainous areas of the Almaty region for just over two years. “Glaciers are melting, which could lead to mudslides. Desertification and land degradation will reduce food security,” said Solovyova. “We are now looking at where people will move and where they will take their livestock.”
AEOK interviewed 1,800 households in 2023 and repeated the interviews in 2024. In this short time, awareness of climate change rose from 7 percent to 30 percent. In July, the mountains around Almaty were on high alert for mudslides. According to Solovyova, these risks must have made locals more vigilant.
In Chung’s view, surviving in the desert or wasteland is difficult, “so more and more people will move to the cities.” He believes now is the time to prepare for this influx. “Many cities in Central Asia suffer from underinvestment in infrastructure. It’s old, and overburdened, and needs to be renovated.”
At the same time, the pursuit of a net-zero future also requires urban adjustments, such as introducing a full cycle of waste recycling or replacing private vehicles with an efficient public network.
In this race to meet green targets, the pressure on public authorities is growing. According to Climate Action Tracker projections, Kazakhstan is likely to miss its climate targets, with emissions rising until at least 2035 under current policies and a planned expansion of new coal-fired power generation, one of the few such cases globally.
Other projects, such as the development of Zhezkazgan in central Kazakhstan into a new hub for the production of “clean” energy equipment, are per se beneficial to the green energy transition. Yet some of them can raise concerns about the sustainable development of local communities.
According to Nobel laureate Chung, the only way to ensure that such communities do not feel thrown under the bus of green economy targets is to include them in the decision-making loop. “You have to give ownership of renewable energy projects to local people. With shared ownership, [such initiatives] will run very smoothly.”
Research for this article was made possible with support from the Pulitzer Center.
By Ekaterina Venkina via Eurasianet.org
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