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Introduction: The Politics and Foreign Policy of Global Warming in East Asia
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Abstract
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The governments of East Asia (i.e., China, Northeast Asia, and Southeast Asia) have been intimately involved in international deliberations on global warming and resulting climate change. Indeed, these countries are central to international efforts to address climate change. They include the world's second largest emitter of GHGs - China - and other major developing-country contributors with growing emissions. East Asia also includes one of the world's major economic powers and one of the largest donors of environmental aid to the developing world, particularly within the region: Japan. And East Asia contains many of the developing countries and vast populations that will be most affected by climate change.
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This book includes studies that examine the implications for East Asia of global warming and climate change, as well as the global regime that has emanated from the international climate negotiations, and show how the countries of East Asia play important roles in the international politics of climate change and the increasingly widespread and disparate efforts to address it at international, national and local levels. We pay particular attention to the domestic and foreign policies of China and Japan. These countries are arguably the most important players in East Asia, and they represent the two extremes of countries in the region. China is a developing country with the world's largest population, many of them highly vulnerable to climate change, and it is second only to the United States in its total national emissions of GHGs. To a great extent, the future of the global atmosphere depends on the future China. Japan is a highly industrialized country with membership in the club of the world's most developed economies. It has major financial and technological resources that can be brought to bear on the problem of climate change, and it also makes a large contribution to GHG concentrations in the atmosphere. Having said this, we also look at countries in the region that are making a smaller contribution to the problem but which have a very large stake in its present and future impacts on their ecologies and socio-economic systems.
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The case studies in this book are important for a number of reasons. Many of the roots of the problem of global warming and climate change, as well as the available solutions to them, are firmly planted in East Asia. Much as the world needs the United States and other developed countries to reduce their extensive emissions of GHGs, if this problem is to be addressed with adequate vigor (at the time of this writing the prospect of this happening any time soon is rather bleak), the world must engage East Asian countries that contribute greatly to the problem through their own emissions. Just as important from the perspective of human well being, the vast populations of East Asia are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Their geographies and their often-severe poverty mean that they will be greatly affected, usually in painful ways, and they will have difficulty coping with these effects. Thus, if we care about the problem of climate change, and if we care about the human suffering caused by it, we must seriously consider and understand the roles played by the countries of East Asia.
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Understanding how and why governmental and nongovernmental actors cooperate at the international level and work at local and national levels to address global warming and climate change requires us to look at many actors and, ideally, to employ several levels of analysis. The environmental foreign policies of the countries of East Asia, and specifically the interactions between their domestic politics and policy-making processes, on one hand, and international relations on global warming and climate change, on the other, are explained by the perceptions and actions of, and deliberations among, many often disparate actors at the individual, national, international and global levels. For example, powerful individuals in China can push policy in new directions; bureaucracies and industrial actors in Japan can shape regulations and policies on climate change; international cooperation can stimulate new actions at the national and local levels, or it can itself be shaped by actors at those levels; global forces, most notably the climate changes that now seem to be underway and the growing norm that countries ought to act to deal with them, are increasingly affecting the world's and East Asia's responses to global warming. The upshot is that we need to look within the countries of East Asia, while simultaneously looking at interactions among them and between them and countries and other actors beyond the region, to fully explain their policies and to comprehend sufficiently how to bring about needed policy changes. The chapters that follow should help, at least a small way, to do this. If acted upon, the lessons from this book may help mitigate global warming in the long term and reduce the suffering that will result from the adverse impacts of climate change.
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