Posted on August 10, 2024 by Yves Smith
Yves here. We’ve posted from time to time on alarmed media stories about how birthrates are declining around the world and at a faster rate than expected, particularly in advanced economies. The subtext is we need growth in population to have groaf, when growth is a function of both population and productivity increases. And of course, there is the elephant in the room of human consumption levels, particularly as standards of living have been rising, producing unsustainable demand for resources.
Japan in particular has tried to increase baby production, with no success. This post usefully takes on the idea that low birth rates are a problem in and of themselves.
By Emily Klancher Merchant, Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies, University of California, Davis and Win Brown, Research Affiliate, Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, University of Washington. Originally published at The Conversation
In the face of shrinking populations, many of the world’s major economies are trying to engineer higher birth rates.
Policymakers from South Korea, Japan and Italy, for example, have all adopted so-called “pronatalist” measures in the belief that doing so will defuse a demographic time bomb. These range from tax breaks and housing benefits for couples who have children to subsidies for fertility treatments.
But here’s the thing: Low – or, for that matter high – birth rates are not a problem in and of themselves. Rather, they are perceived as a cause of or contributor to other problems: With low birth rates come slow economic growth and a top-heavy age structure; high birth rates mean resource depletion and environmental degradation.
Moreover, birth rates are notoriously hard to change, and efforts to do so often become coercive, even if they don’t start out that way.
As demographers and population experts, we also know that such efforts are usually unnecessary. Manipulating fertility is an inefficient means of solving social, economic and environmental problems that are almost always better addressed more directly through regulation and redistribution.
A New Pronatalist Movement
According to the most likely scenario, the world’s population will peak around the beginning of 2084 at about 10.3 billion people – approximately 2 billion more than we have today. After that, the global population is projected to stop growing and will likely shrink to just below 10.2 billion by 2100.
Yet many countries are already ahead of this curve, with populations predicted to decline in the next decade. And that has prompted concerns among some nations’ economists over economic growth and old-age support. In some instances, it has also prompted nativist fears about “replacement” through immigration.
As of 2019, 55 countries – mainly in Asia, Europe and the Middle East – had explicit policies aimed at raising birth rates.
The U.S. does have a child tax credit but no policies directly aimed at raising birth rates, according to the U.N., which tracks population policies worldwide.
Even so, in recent years a new pronatalist movement has emerged in the U.S., drawing heavily from a range of ideologies, including racism, nativism, neoliberalism, effective altruism and longtermism.
Among the voices pushing for pronatalist policies are Elon Muskand influencers Malcolm and Simone Collins, who warn that the human population is on the verge of collapse.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has indicated he wants incentives for women to have more babies, and his running mate, JD Vance, has been a rare voice on the floor of Congress warning of a U.S. baby bust.
New Babies to Solve Old Problems
The pronatalist movement is, we believe, inherently misguided. It is premised on the belief that ever-larger populations are needed to spur economic growth, which alone will lift individuals and communities out of poverty.
But absent direct state intervention, this additional wealth generally accrues to those with established higher incomes, often at the expense of workers and consumers.
Seen this way, pronatalism is a Ponzi scheme. It relies on new entrants to produce returns for earlier investors, with the burdens falling most heavily on women, who are responsible for the bulk of childbearing and child-rearing, often without adequate medical care or affordable child care.
Government Intervention in Reproduction
For nearly a century, governments have used access to birth control and abortion as levers with which to try to adjust their population growth rates, but usually in the other direction: making birth control and abortion more widely available – and often pushing them on people who wanted more children – when birth rates were deemed too high. Such policies were implemented in numerous countries between the 1960s and 1990s to stimulate economic growth, with China’s one-child policy the most extreme example. Ironically, while high birth rates were once seen as a barrier to economic development, today low birth rates are seen as a drag on economic growth.
Advocates of efforts to reduce birth rates have pointed to the beneficial effects of family planning services. But critics warn that instrumentalizing reproductive health care – offering it as a means to the end of slowing population growth rather than an end in itself – makes it vulnerable to being taken away if population growth is deemed too slow.
Indeed, several of the countries that now restrict access to birth control and abortion, including South Korea and Iran, once promoted them in order to reduce their birth rate.
In 1968, the International Conference on Human Rights declared that couples had the right to decide the number and spacing of their children. At that time, the growth of the world’s population was at its all-time high of just over 2% per year.
But if humans have the inherent right to control their reproductive lives, it follows that governments need to protect that right when birth rates are low as well as when they are high. It is, in our view, incumbent on policymakers to use other interventions to reach economic and social goals.
And these more direct approaches can be effective. For example, in the U.S., we saw child poverty cut in half during the COVID-19 pandemic as a result of a higher tax credit, only to return to pre-COVID-19 levels when Congress allowed the supplemental credit to lapse.
Little Effect on Birth Rates
To date, pronatalist policies have largely focused on subsidizing the cost of child-rearing and helping parents remain in the labor force.
While enormously beneficial to parents and children, such policies have had little effect on birth rates. For example, Italy’s 2020 Family Act – a comprehensive program that provides family allowances, increases paternity leave, supplements the salaries of mothers and subsidizes child care – has not stemmed the country’s falling fertility rate.
As fertility rates continue to drop, and as popular anxiety about population collapse heightens, governments are beginning to take more draconian measures. Along with promoting assisted reproductive technologies, South Korea banned abortion in 2005. China’s State Council recently announced the goal of “reducing non-medically necessary abortions,” supposedly to promote “women’s development.”
Around the same time, Iran severely restricted access to abortion, sterilization and contraception for the express purpose of increasing the birth rate.
Borrowing from the Future
Those who deny racist, nativist or religious intentions in promoting pronatalism – especially in the U.S. – usually advocate for it on economic grounds.
Their reasoning is that declining fertility produces a top-heavy age structure. In the U.S. context, this means a large number of elderly people collecting Social Security relative to the number of working people paying into the system.
Experts have been projecting the insolvency of Social Securityfor decades. But the truth is that the U.S. does not need more babies to keep Social Security afloat. Rather, policymakers can increase the size of the working-age population through pro-immigration policies and can increase the amount of money flowing into Social Security by lifting the income cap on contributions.
Governments can provide education, contraception and other health care services, not because doing so will reduce birth rates but because these are vital components of a progressive, fair-minded society. And they can provide parental leave, child tax credits and high-quality child care, not because doing so will increase birth rates but because it will help the children who are born get the best possible start in life.
Seen through this lens, pronatalism offers a hollow-ringing promise that simply having more people will solve social and economic problems faced by a nation’s current population. But that amounts to borrowing from the future to pay the debts of the past.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/08 ... cheme.html
Confronting Low Fertility Rates and Population Decline
Posted on August 16, 2024 by Yves Smith
Yves here. Even though this post looks at the question of what to do about the baby bust in wealthy countries from an economic perspective, unlike many other accounts, it treats seriously the question of how to adapt to a static or falling population. It suggests investing heavily in citizens to make them more productive, particularly focusing on education. It also recommends improving health care and allowing for more flexible work arrangements for the aged, and of course includes the usual trope of better child care.
It’s noteworthy how many of these policies are at odds with the default behavior under neoliberalism, particularly turning schooling and medical care into looting opportunities.
By David Bloom, Michael Kuhn, and Klaus Prettner. Originally published at VoxEU<
Fertility rates have been declining in high-income countries for decades. This trend, along with increasing human longevity, poses a challenge for advanced economies. This column argues that a holistic set of policies can be implemented to address the economic risks. These policies should stimulate human capital accumulation and education, which are more important than population size for economic prosperity. Furthermore, polices should promote healthy aging and more choice over retirement decisions, and family-friendly policies to slow the fall in fertility should be enacted.
Fertility rates have been declining in high-income countries for decades. From 1960 to 2023, the total fertility rate (TFR, which represents the expected lifetime number of children per woman, given current age-specific fertility rates) among OECD countries fell by more than half – from 3.29 children per woman to 1.54 (United Nations 2024a). All but one of the 38 OECD countries (Israel being the exception) currently have a TFR well below the long-run replacement rate of roughly 2.1, meaning that their total and working-age populations are on long-term contractionary paths (see Table 1).
Table 1 Total fertility rates (TFRs) of OECD countries and the world in 1960, 2023, and 2050

Source: United Nations (2024a); see also United Nations (2024b) for a description of the TFR estimation and (medium scenario) projection methods.
In “The End of Economic Growth? Unintended Consequences of a Declining Population,” Charles Jones argues that the “profound implications” of low fertility include a growing paucity of new ideas that could effectively asphyxiate innovation and lead to long-run economic stagnation (Jones 2022). He points out that multiple economic growth models centre on innovation and that a larger population with larger absolute numbers of researchers, scientists, and inventors—and therefore, more bites at the (breakthrough) apple—is likely to achieve more (and more significant) discoveries. Jones proposes a model in which negative population growth leads to an ‘Empty Planet’ scenario (Bricker and Ibbitson 2019) wherein “knowledge and living standards stagnate for a population that gradually vanishes”. Jones juxtaposes this outcome against one of continued population growth and improvements in living standards that he calls the ‘Expanding Cosmos’ (Jones 2022). “Can the quality of people substitute for the quantity of people in the production of ideas?” Jones ponders in a Stanford Graduate School of Business piece. “Basically, the answer’s no. If the number of people is shrinking to zero, it’s hard to imagine that one person with lots of education can make up for a billion people that contain Einstein and Edison and Jennifer Doudna” (Gilson 2022). While Jones allows that automation and artificial intelligence could help maintain or improve living standards by propagating scientific advances, the central question of his piece’s title sounds an ominous note for declining fertility (Jones 2022).
In our recent paper (Bloom et al. 2024), we review data and ideas pertaining to the historically unprecedented fertility decline that characterises today’s wealthy industrial countries. We acknowledge that falling fertility could hinder innovation. But we argue that changes in behaviour, technology, policy, and institutions can influence the economic impacts of fertility and workforce decline and fertility levels themselves.
Innovation is indisputably a driver of economic progress, but it depends on more than just population size. Human capital – the skills and capacities that are embodied in people and enhance their ability to create valuable goods and services – is also key to innovation. Another basic feature of human capital is that it can be purposively accumulated, typically through investments in schooling, job training, or health.
Education, for example, is a well-established determinant of macroeconomic performance and economic well-being. It also tends to expand naturally under conditions of low fertility, leveraging wider and deeper investments into the knowledge and skills of small-sized cohorts. In this way, low fertility tends to enhance a population’s capacity for innovation and enables it to create more value through work, spurring both individual and societal well-being (Lee and Mason 2010, Prettner et al. 2013). Other things equal, small birth cohorts also aid population health.
History and rigorous research indicate that a population’s productive characteristics figure more prominently than its size in defining its capacity for knowledge creation and innovation. The number of healthy and well-educated people – which is distinct from the number of people – represents the human capital that rightly features in the knowledge production function as a fundamental determinant of technological progress and economic growth.
Oded Galor’s recent book, The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality, buttresses our more optimistic perspective on the implications of low fertility for economic growth. This book centres on the argument that falling fertility and rising education (and subsequent technological progress) leading to human capital formation is at the core of long-term increases in economic prosperity (Galor 2022). Indeed, Galor points out that since the 19th century, life expectancy has doubled and per capita incomes have skyrocketed 14-fold across the globe, spurred by fertility decline that alleviated population pressure, paving the way for human capital accumulation and dramatic improvements in living standards.
Low and declining fertility also translates into short- and medium-term declines in youth dependency rates, which can further charge the economic growth process by naturally boosting rates of labour force participation, savings, and capital accumulation. This boost, which is known as a demographic dividend (Bloom et al. 2003), contributed up to 2–3 percentage points to the growth rates of income per capita in many countries following the end of the baby boom that occurred in the aftermath of WWII. As such, the trend of falling fertility in high-income countries from the 1950s to the present day has promoted – not impeded – economic activity and improved standards of living.
The challenge of low fertility is magnified by the fact that it causes older-age population shares to swell. Population aging may naturally hamper economic activity insofar as older people impose significant burdens associated with public expenditures on health and long-term care and economic security and tend to work less than their younger counterparts. Social and economic adaptations to these demographic realities are nevertheless possible.
Retirement policy reforms are one of those adaptations (Kuhn and Prettner 2023). Such reforms have considerable potential to forestall workforce shrinkage by removing the disincentives to working longer that increasingly long-lived people face. This strategy is emblematic of how policies related to declining fertility may be stronger in unison than in isolation: robust investments in the health and education of a relatively small youth and prime-age adult cohort may enable that cohort – as it reaches the older ages – to be healthy and well-trained enough to work productively past traditional retirement ages. In the middle of the United Nations’ Decade of Healthy Ageing, a frequently asked question remains relevant: are we just adding years to life, or are we also adding life to years (Bloom 2019)? Coupled with allowing more choice over retirement decisions, policies promoting healthy aging could relieve the mounting pressure on pension and health systems and the accelerating demand for long-term care in the wake of population aging (Bloom 2022). Thus, stakeholders would benefit from combining synergistic policy initiatives to augment their efficacy.
Public and private policymakers also have at their disposal a myriad of family-friendly policies that can slow or reverse the fall in fertility. These policies, which seek to balance work and family responsibilities, include tax breaks for larger families, extended parental leave policies, and—most effective of all, according to Doepke et al. (2023)—public and/or subsidised childcare. Of course, if such policies achieve their aims, the short- and medium-term result would be an increase in the youth dependency ratio, with gains in workforce size not beginning to accrue for approximately 20 years.
Policy decisions must be mindful of the evolving work landscape, particularly the rise of digitalisation, robotics, automation, and artificial intelligence (see Prettner and Bloom 2020). While these tools offer tantalising potential, such evolution will not only impact the types of jobs available and how they are performed (as well as what is produced and consumed), but it will also affect the way that workers interact socially, which will likely have significant implications for dating and partnering, with an as-yet indeterminate effect on fertility levels and patterns.
Thoughtful policy changes should be holistic, recognising the social and political repercussions alongside the economic outcomes. Policies that relax or restrict international migration may be nationally or internationally destabilising, depending on contextual factors, and have implications for social and economic equity. In addition, the environmental implications of low fertility must be kept in view as it could slow or accelerate the pace of climate change depending on whether fewer people with higher incomes have the net effect of easing or intensifying greenhouse gas emissions.
Low fertility and fertility decline are indisputable realities in high-income countries across the globe. Given the significant uncertainty surrounding the nature and magnitude of its attendant economic consequences, ignoring the low-fertility alarm bell would be imprudent, particularly when fertility decline is paired with another dominant demographic trend: increasing human longevity. But demography is not destiny. Fertility decline—and its implications for population size and structure—poses serious challenges, but they are not insurmountable. Humanity has an admirable record of identifying and taking advantage of the opportunities it faces. In this situation, multiple mechanisms are available for countering low fertility and addressing its economic repercussions. The time is ripe for mounting a swift and integrated response to pinpoint and implement the most promising policy countermeasures.
See original post for references
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Do rich countries need open-ended growth just so the rich get richer? Don't think so.
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Laundering Carbon and the New Scramble for Africa
August 11, 2024
The carbon offset market is an integral part of efforts to prevent effective climate action

by Adam Hanieh
Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM)
August 11, 2024
In early November 2023, shortly before the COP28 summit opened in Dubai, a hitherto obscure UAE firm attracted significant media attention around news of their prospective land deals in Africa.
Reports suggested that Blue Carbon—a company privately owned by Sheikh Ahmed al-Maktoum, a member of Dubai’s ruling family—had signed deals promising the firm control over vast tracts of land across the African continent. These deals included an astonishing 10 percent of the landmass in Liberia, Zambia and Tanzania, and 20 percent in Zimbabwe. Altogether, the area equaled the size of Britain.
Blue Carbon intended to use the land to launch carbon offset projects, an increasingly popular practice that proponents claim will help tackle climate change. Carbon offsets involve forest protection and other environmental schemes that are equated to a certain quantity of carbon “credits.” These credits can then be sold to polluters around the world to offset their own emissions. Prior to entering into the negotiations of the massive deal, Blue Carbon had no experience in either carbon offsets or forest management. Nonetheless the firm stood to make billions of dollars from these projects.
Environmental NGOs, journalists and activists quickly condemned the deals as a new “scramble for Africa”—a land grab enacted in the name of climate change mitigation. In response, Blue Carbon insisted the discussions were merely exploratory and would require community consultation and further negotiation before formal approval.
Regardless of their current status, the land deals raise concerns that indigenous and other local communities could be evicted to make way for Blue Carbon’s forest protection plans. In Eastern Kenya, for example, the indigenous Ogiek People were driven out of the Mau Forest in November 2023, an expulsion that lawyers linked to ongoing negotiations between Blue Carbon and Kenya’s president, William Ruto. Protests have also followed the Liberian government’s closed-door negotiations with Blue Carbon, with activists claiming the project violates the land rights of indigenous people enshrined within Liberian law. Similar cases of land evictions elsewhere have led the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Francisco Calí Tzay, to call for a global moratorium on carbon offset projects.
Beyond their potentially destructive impact on local communities, Blue Carbon’s activities in Africa point to a major shift in the climate strategies of Gulf states. As critics have shown, the carbon offsetting industry exists largely as a greenwashing mechanism, allowing polluters to hide their continued emissions behind the smokescreen of misleading carbon accounting methodologies while providing a profitable new asset class for financial actors. As the world’s largest exporters of crude oil and liquified natural gas, the Gulf states are now positioning themselves across all stages of this new industry—including the financial markets where carbon credits are bought and sold. This development is reconfiguring the Gulf’s relationships with the African continent and will have significant consequences for the trajectories of our warming planet.
False Accounting and Carbon Laundering
There are many varieties of carbon offset projects. The most common involves the avoided deforestation schemes that make up the bulk of Blue Carbon’s interest in African land. In these schemes, land is enclosed and protected from deforestation. Carbon offset certifiers—of which the largest in the world is the Washington-based firm, Verra—then assess the amount of carbon these projects prevent from being released into the atmosphere (measured in tons of CO2). Once assessed, carbon credits can be sold to polluters, who use them to cancel out their own emissions and thus meet their stated climate goals.
Superficially attractive—after all, who doesn’t want to see money going into the protection of forests?—such schemes have two major flaws. The first is known as “permanence.” Buyers who purchase carbon credits gain the right to pollute in the here and now. Meanwhile, it takes hundreds of years for those carbon emissions to be re-absorbed from the atmosphere, and there is no guarantee that the forest will continue to stand for that timeframe. If a forest fire occurs or the political situation changes and the forest is destroyed, it is too late to take back the carbon credits that were initially issued. This concern is not simply theoretical. In recent years, California wildfires have consumed millions of hectares of forest, including offsets purchased by major international firms such as Microsoft and BP. Given the increasing incidence of forest fires due to global warming, such outcomes will undoubtedly become more frequent.
Again, this estimate depends on an unknowable future, opening up significant profit-making opportunities for companies certifying and selling carbon credits.
The second major flaw with these schemes is that any estimation of carbon credits for avoided deforestation projects rests on an imaginary counterfactual: How much carbon would have been released if the offset project were not in place? Again, this estimate depends on an unknowable future, opening up significant profit-making opportunities for companies certifying and selling carbon credits. By inflating the estimated emissions reductions associated with a particular project, it is possible to sell many more carbon credits than are actually warranted. This scope for speculation is one reason why the carbon credit market is so closely associated with repeated scandals and corruption. Indeed, according to reporting in the New Yorker, after one massive carbon fraud was revealed in Europe, “the Danish government admitted that eighty per cent of the country’s carbon-trading firms were fronts for the racket.”[1]
These methodological problems are structurally intrinsic to offsetting and cannot be avoided. As a result, most carbon credits traded today are fictitious and do not result in any real reduction in carbon emissions. Tunisian analyst Fadhel Kaboub describes them as simply “a license to pollute.”[2] One investigative report from early 2023 found that more than 90 percent of rainforest carbon credits certified by Verra were likely bogus and did not represent actual carbon reductions. Another study conducted for the EU Commission reported that 85 percent of the offset projects established under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism failed to reduce emissions. A recent academic study of offset projects across six countries, meanwhile, found that most did not reduce deforestation, and for those that did, the reductions were significantly lower than initially claimed. Consequently, the authors conclude, carbon credits sold for these projects were used to “offset almost three times more carbon emissions than their actual contributions to climate change mitigation.”[3]
Despite these fundamental problems—or perhaps because of them—the use of carbon offsets is growing rapidly. The investment bank Morgan Stanley predicts that the market will be worth $250 billion by 2050, up from about $2 billion in 2020, as large polluters utilize offsetting to sanction their continued carbon emissions while claiming to meet net zero targets. In the case of Blue Carbon, one estimate found that the amount of carbon credits likely to be accredited through the firm’s projects in Africa would equal all of the UAE’s annual carbon emissions. Akin to carbon laundering, this practice allows ongoing emissions to disappear from the carbon accounting ledger, swapped for credits that have little basis in reality.
Monetizing Nature as a Development Strategy
For the African continent, the growth of these new carbon markets cannot be separated from the escalating global debt crisis that has followed the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. According to a new database, Debt Service Watch, the Global South is experiencing its worst debt crisis on record, with one-third of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa spending over half their budget revenues on servicing debt. Faced with such unprecedented fiscal pressures, the commodification of land through offsetting is now heavily promoted by international lenders and many development organizations as a way out of the deep-rooted crisis.
The African Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI), an alliance launched in 2022 at the Cairo COP27 summit, has emerged as a prominent voice in this new development discourse. ACMI brings together African leaders, carbon credit firms (including Verra), Western donors (USAID, the Rockefeller Foundation and Jeff Bezos’ Earth Fund) and multilateral organizations like the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. Along with practical efforts to mobilize funds and encourage policy changes, ACMI has taken a lead role in advocating for carbon markets as a win-win solution for both heavily indebted African countries and the climate. In the words of the organization’s founding document, “The emergence of carbon credits as a new product allows for the monetization of Africa’s large natural capital endowment, while enhancing it.”[4]
ACMI’s activities are deeply tied to the Gulf. One side to this relationship is that Gulf firms, especially fossil fuel producers, are now the key source of demand for future African carbon credits. At the September 2023 African Climate Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, for example, a group of prominent Emirati energy and financial firms (known as the UAE Carbon Alliance) committed to purchasing $450 million worth of carbon credits from ACMI over the next six years. The pledge immediately confirmed the UAE as ACMI’s biggest financial backer. Moreover, by guaranteeing demand for carbon credits for the rest of this decade, the UAE’s pledge helps create the market today, driving forward new offset projects and solidifying their place in the development strategies of African states. It also helps legitimize offsetting as a response to the climate emergency, despite the numerous scandals that have beset the industry in recent years.
Saudi Arabia is likewise playing a major role in pushing forward carbon markets in Africa. One of ACMI’s steering committee members is the Saudi businesswoman, Riham ElGizy, who heads the Regional Voluntary Carbon Market Company (RVCMC). Established in 2022 as a joint venture between the Public Investment Fund (Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund) and the Saudi stock exchange, Tadawul, RVCMC has organized the world’s two largest carbon auctions, selling more than 3.5 million tons worth of carbon credits in 2022 and 2023. 70 percent of the credits sold in these auctions were sourced from offset projects in Africa, with the 2023 auction taking place in Kenya. The principal buyers of these credits were Saudi firms, led by the largest oil company in the world, Saudi Aramco.
Beyond simply owning offset projects in Africa, the Gulf states are also positioning themselves at the other end of the carbon value chain: the marketing and sale of carbon credits to regional and international buyers.
The Emirati and Saudi relationships with ACMI and the trade in African carbon credits illustrate a notable development when it comes to the Gulf’s role in these new markets. Beyond simply owning offset projects in Africa, the Gulf states are also positioning themselves at the other end of the carbon value chain: the marketing and sale of carbon credits to regional and international buyers. In this respect, the Gulf is emerging as a key economic space where African carbon is turned into a financial asset that can be bought, sold and speculated upon by financial actors across the globe.
Indeed, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have each sought to establish permanent carbon exchanges, where carbon credits can be bought and sold just like any other commodity. The UAE set up the first such trading exchange following an investment by the Abu Dhabi-controlled sovereign wealth fund, Mubadala, in the Singapore-based AirCarbon Exchange (ACX) in September 2022. As part of this acquisition, Mubadala now owns 20 percent of ACX and has established a regulated digital carbon trading exchange in Abu Dhabi’s financial free zone, the Abu Dhabi Global Market. ACX claims the exchange is the first regulated exchange of its kind in the world, with the trade in carbon credits beginning there in late 2023. Likewise, in Saudi Arabia the RVCMC has partnered with US market technology firm Xpansiv to establish a permanent carbon credit exchange set to launch in late 2024.
Whether these two Gulf-based exchanges will compete or prioritize different trading instruments, such as carbon derivatives or Shariah-compliant carbon credits, remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that major financial centers in the Gulf are leveraging their existing infrastructures to establish regional dominance in the sale of carbon. Active at all stages of the offsetting industry—from generating carbon credits to purchasing them—the Gulf is now a principal actor in the new forms of wealth extraction that connect the African continent to the wider global economy.
Entrenching a Fossil-Fueled Future
Over the past two decades, the Gulf’s oil and especially gas production has grown markedly, alongside a substantial eastward shift in energy exports to meet the new hydrocarbon demand from China and East Asia. At the same time, the Gulf states have expanded their involvement in energy-intensive downstream sectors, notably the production of petrochemicals, plastics and fertilizers. Led by Saudi Aramco and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Gulf-based National Oil Companies now rival the traditional Western oil supermajors in key metrics such as reserves, refining capacity and export levels.
Rather, much like the big Western oil companies, the Gulf’s vision of expanded fossil fuel production is accompanied by an attempt to seize the leadership of global efforts to tackle the climate crisis.
In this context—and despite the reality of the climate emergency—the Gulf states are doubling down on fossil fuel production, seeing much to be gained from hanging on to an oil-centered world for as long as possible. As the Saudi oil minister vowed back in 2021, “every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out.”[5] But this approach does not mean the Gulf states have adopted a stance of head-in-the-sand climate change denialism. Rather, much like the big Western oil companies, the Gulf’s vision of expanded fossil fuel production is accompanied by an attempt to seize the leadership of global efforts to tackle the climate crisis.
One side to this approach is their heavy involvement in flawed and unproven low carbon technologies, like hydrogen and carbon capture. Another is their attempts to steer global climate negotiations, seen in the recent UN climate change conferences, COP27 and COP28, where the Gulf states channeled policy discussions away from effective efforts to phase out fossil fuels, turning these events into little more than corporate spectacles and networking forums for the oil industry.
The carbon offset market should be viewed as an integral part of these efforts to delay, obfuscate and obstruct addressing climate change in meaningful ways. Through the deceptive carbon accounting of offset projects, the big oil and gas industries in the Gulf can continue business as usual while claiming to meet their so-called climate targets. The Gulf’s dispossession of African land is key to this strategy, ultimately enabling the disastrous specter of ever-accelerating fossil fuel production.
Adam Hanieh is a professor of political economy and global development at the University of Exeter’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies. His forthcoming book is Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market.(Verso, September 2024).
Footnotes
[1] Heidi Blake, “The Great Cash-for-Carbon Hustle,” The New Yorker, October 16, 2023.
[2] Katherine Hearst, “Kenya concedes ‘millions of hectares’ to UAE firm in latest carbon offset deal,” Middle East Eye, November 5, 2023.
[3] Thales A. P. West et al., “Action needed to make carbon offsets from forest conservation work for climate change,” Science 381/6660 (August 2023), p. 876.
[4] “Africa Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI): Roadmap Report,” ACMI, November 8, 2022, p. 12.
[5] Javier Blas, “The Saudi Prince of Oil Prices Vows to Drill ‘Every Last Molecule’,” Bloomberg, July 22, 2021.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/0 ... or-africa/
Extremely hot days double for half a billion children
August 14, 2024
Across 100 countries, over half of children experience twice as many heatwaves as 60 years ago

One in 5 children – or 466 million – live in areas that experience at least double the number of extremely hot days every year compared to just six decades ago, according to a new UNICEF analysis.“The report finds that climate change is impacting almost every aspect of child health and well-being from pregnancy to adolescence. The health impacts compound as children face climate-related hazards that often overlap. Of great concern is the risk of adverse birth outcomes, including pre-term birth and low birth weight, increasing across most climate-related hazards. Neonates and infants have a higher risk of death due to air pollution and extreme heat. Killer infectious diseases for children, like malaria, are expected to intensify with climate change. Malnutrition, underlying half of all under-five deaths globally, is set to increase due to extreme weather events, in addition to injuries.”
A THREAT TO PROGRESS: Confronting the effects of climate change on child health and well-being (UNICEF, 2024)
Using a comparison between a 1960s and a 2020-2024 average, the analysis issues a stark warning about the speed and scale at which extremely hot days – measured as more than 35 degrees Celsius / 95 degrees Fahrenheit – are increasing for almost half a billion children worldwide, many without the infrastructure or services to endure it.
“The hottest summer days now seem normal,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell. “Extreme heat is increasing, disrupting children’s health, well-being and daily routines.”
The analysis also examines country-level data and finds that in 16 countries, children now experience more than a month of additional extremely hot days compared to six decades ago. In South Sudan, for example, children are living through a yearly average of 165 extremely hot days this decade compared to 110 days in the 1960s, while in Paraguay it has jumped to 71 days from 36.
Globally, children in West and Central Africa face the highest exposure to extremely hot days and the most significant increases over time, according to the analysis. 123 million children – or 39 per cent of children in the region – now experience an average of more than one third of the year – or at least 95 days – in temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius, reaching as many as 212 days in Mali, 202 days in Niger, 198 days in Senegal, and 195 days in Sudan. In Latin America and the Caribbean, almost 48 million children live in areas that are experiencing twice the number of extremely hot days.
Heat stress within the body, caused by exposure to extreme heat, poses unique threats to the health and well-being of children and pregnant women, particularly if cooling interventions are not available. It has been linked to pregnancy complications such as gestational chronic diseases and adverse birth outcomes including stillbirth, low birth weight, and preterm birth. Excess levels of heat stress also contribute to child malnutrition, non-communicable diseases such as heat-related illnesses, and leave children more vulnerable to infectious diseases that spread in high temperatures such as malaria and dengue. Evidence shows that it also impacts neurodevelopment, mental health, and well-being.
Extreme heat also has more concerning effects when experienced in longer periods of time. While extreme heat is increasing in every country worldwide, the analysis shows that children are also exposed to more severe, longer, and frequent heatwaves. Across 100 countries, more than half of children are experiencing twice as many heatwaves today as 60 years ago. In the United States, for example, 36 million children are exposed to double the number of heatwaves compared to 60 years ago, and 5.7 million are exposed to three times as many.
The impact of climate-related hazards on child health is multiplied by how climate-related hazards affect food and water security and contamination, damage infrastructure, disrupt services for children, including education, and drive displacement. In addition, the severity of these impacts is determined by underlying vulnerabilities and inequities children face based on their socioeconomic status, gender, location, existing health status and country context.
“Children are not little adults. Their bodies are far more vulnerable to extreme heat. Young bodies heat up faster, and cool down more slowly. Extreme heat is especially risky for babies due to their faster heart rate, so rising temperatures are even more alarming for children,” Russell said.
“Governments must act to get rising temperatures under control, and there is a unique opportunity to do that right now. As governments are currently drafting their national climate action plans, they can do so with the ambition and knowledge that today’s children and future generations will have to live in the world they leave behind.”
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/0 ... -children/