Over the past few years governments around the world have been setting carbon neutrality
targets for their individual countries.
Some of them have been written into law while some of them have just been
promised. But like a pinky promise, so, you know, please go back to school children. And
even if there’s some healthy skepticism of whether these targets are actually going
to be hit or if they go far enough to save us from a devastating temperature rise, they
mark an important step from sweeping the issue under the rug to now at least marking it on
their national agendas.
However, there’s one country that is way ahead of the game on this. And I know what
you’re thinking, Scandinavia, those bloody Scandi’s with their beautiful landscapes,
insanely high national happiness and inspirationally young leaders, I bet it’s one of them coming
to show off on the world stage again. But you’d be wrong, you actually have to look
much further East to find the country we’re talking about. No further East, okay too far
and down a bit, up a little, zoom, zoom again, that’s the one. The historic and completely
landlocked Kingdom of Bhutan, sandwiched between two of the most populated and most polluting
countries in the world is the first to be not only carbon neutral but carbon negative,
and negative by a pretty significant amount.
So let’s look at how a, as the UN defines, ‘least developed’ nation managed to make
it to carbon negative. And how, with social and economic pressures, do they plan to stay
there.
Let’s start off with some context: Bhutan is a heavily mountainous sparsely populated
country of around 800,000, mostly Buhddist people. It’s got about as many people as
Frankfurt and is a similar size to Switzerland, but has about a tenth of the population and
probably less fondue. As previously mentioned, the UN puts it on it’s list of ‘least
developed’ countries, with a GDP of under 2 billion dollars it’s, in gross terms,
is one of the poorest countries in Asia. One of the big reasons for this lack of development
is most likely it’s isolation. General tourists weren’t allowed to visit the country until
the 1970s and the TV and Internet in the country is younger than I am.
There’s plenty of other stuff about this place that makes it super interesting, from
the fact that the entire country is devoid of traffic lights to the fact that virtually
all tobacco products are illegal or from these funky looking guys being the national animal
to these road signs that sound like they could be from a cheesy road safety video tape you
were forced to watch at school. ‘For safe arriving no liquor in driving’
‘After drinking whiskey driving is risky’ ‘Don’t hurry be cool since heaven is already
full’ Or my personal favourite ‘Peep peep don’t
sleep’
But back to the science, how did this underdeveloped, recently opened country manage to become the
only in the world to be carbon neutral. I’ll talk about a few factors in this video but
there are sure to be hundreds of smaller factors at play too. The three biggest factors to
the ecological make up are, the lack of development, trees and water. They’re all factors that
you could argue Bhutan has just been lucky to get, but I’ll also talk about some of
the measures they’re taking to preserve what they’ve been given.
So firstly, as we already know the country is pretty underdeveloped. Because they’ve
got some serious hills, the infrastructure needed to build a strong industrial economy
is hugely expensive and far out of their current reach, other highly mountainous states like
Nepal have similar issues. Reportedly they didn’t even start working on their first
road until 1960 and in 2014 there were only around 70,000 registered vehicles in the nation,
that’s about the same number as would be in Gary, Indiana. This means that for pretty
obvious reasons they emit a fair amount less pollution than many more developed countries.
And while many of the countries that surround it have become synonymous with their booming
industry and the ability to make cheap goods fast and then ship them across the world painfully
slowly, Bhutan hasn’t had the chance to emulate this because of the poor transport
links. Again similarly to Nepal a majority of their population are employed in agriculture
or forestry, another reason to keep the country climate friendly.
However, things will change in Bhutan. Development will come and with it bring some of the pollution
problems much of the rest of the world is currently trying to come to grips with. As
the number of motorised vehicles is expected to grow the government has taken measures
to incentivise and subsidies electric vehicles, in the hopes that these will become the predominant
form of transport. One issue that the lack of development does bring is the fact that
many of the rural communities don’t have access to electricity. The government plans
to expand the electricity grid and even provide free electricity to rural communities. Not
only will this bring greater connection and likely transport infrastructure but the hope
is that it will stop the rural communities from harvesting the second major factor in
Bhutan’s carbon negative journey, trees.
As we all know trees are good. Good for climbing, good for looking at but most importantly good
for sucking poison out of the air. As most of the rest of the world is seeing a devastating
level of deforestation and attempts to counteract this, Bhutan is trying to hold on to what
it already has. And that's a country with somewhere between 70 and 80% forest cover.
This acts as a huge carbon sink for the country. The 2013 carbon emissions for Bhutan were
somewhere around 2.2 million tonnes. However, the forests covering the nation are absorbing
around 6.3 million tonnes a year, already putting them in the carbon negative. There’s
a big focus on protecting these forests, so big in fact it’s enshrined in their constitution.
Only written in 2008, the Bhutanese articles of constitution set out that the government
must never let forest cover fall below 60%, as well as imposing age limits on the monarch
and the ability to impeach them. So, better than your average constitution. However, many
of these numbers come from the Bhutanese government itself with some doubt being thrown onto them
by the US’ Federal Research Division that quotes in the 90’s the forest cover was
said to be at 60-64% and some other estimates already had it below the target at around
50%. One thing that can be more easily confirmed is the status of 42% of the land as protected
areas.
Bhutan has always had a bit of a thing for trees, they banned private commercial logging
in 1979 and has imposed strict rules on public sector logging. They’ve also got a helping
hand from their cultural heritage. As at least 70% of the country is Bhuddist there’s a
strong connection with trees that are seen as ‘symbols of long life, health, beauty
and compassion’ and they put this into practice. When a new prince was born in 2016, they planted
108,000 tree saplings in his honour. The country also set a world record for the most trees
planted in an hour in 2015 with just under 50,000.
However, this doesn’t mean people don’t use the wood as fuel. When looking at the
energy breakdown we see that a vast majority comes from ‘solid biofuels’, which aren’t
that type of log but this type. But this is where the third and possibly most impactful
factor comes in. Water.
Not just any water. Fast water. Water so fast that it can create an impressive amount of
electricity. So impressive in fact that Bhutan exports somewhere around 64% of its hydropower
energy to its closest economic ally, India. These exports are so large that they reportedly
make up 14% of Bhutan’s GDP. According to the Bhutanese government this offsets 4.4
million tonnes of CO2 a year already and they’re barely tapping into they’re hydropower potential.
In 2016 the Prime Minister claimed in a TED talk that if they harness just half of the
potential hydropower they could offset somewhere around 50 million tonnes of CO2 a year, or
roughly the yearly emissions of New York.
But along with the other benefits to hydropower the country has a pretty serious reason to
want to ease the global climate crisis. It sits in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region also
known as the ‘Third Pole’. Outside of the giant masses of ice and snow that sit
at either end of our globe, this area of 4.2 million square meters holds the largest deposit
of ice and snow. And it’s at the heart of the most populated continent on the planet.
With global temperatures rising, estimates suggest that 1.3 billion people or around
one sixth of the world’s population could be severely affected by flooding and disruption
to the food supply it would cause.
So what else are the Bhutanese government doing to prevent their emissions contributing
to the issue? With its emergence onto the world stage as a climate friendly destination
Bhutan has seen a steep increase in visitor numbers with around 275,000 visitors in 2018,
up more than double from just four years prior. However, this probably still doesn’t sound
like a lot considering in the same year Switzerland saw, on average, that number around every
four days. But that’s largely down to Bhutan’s tourist policy. They’ve made it purposefully
expensive to visit the country, promoting ‘high value low impact’ tourism. With
the base charge standing at 250 dollars per person per night it puts the price of a trip
way above that of its neighbouring countries. This fee does include various things like
hotel accommodation, food, transport and entry to tourist sites but it seems even the initial
number is enough to put many people off. The fee also portions a cut to ‘sustainable
development’ giving the government another source of much needed income. One other reason
for the lack of tourists might be that there is only one airport in the country and it’s
so hard to fly into because of the mountainous terrain, that only a handful of pilots are
even allowed to land there.
However, the funding from tourism isn’t enough, without support Bhutan says it might
not be able to keep up it’s current level of carbon neutrality. They’ve therefore,
along with WWF and several other large donors launched a fund hoping to raise upwards of
40 billion dollars to help fund the government's attempts to keep the country green over the
next fourteen years when the government thinks it will then be able to take over this funding
entirely.
It’s worth noting that this is obviously a very specific case, many of the things that
make Bhutan carbon negative just wouldn’t be plausible in many other countries. However,
as a country that has done nothing to contribute to the climate crisis they’re one of the
countries at the most risk of its effects.
Do you think it’s possible for any other countries to follow Bhutan’s road to carbon
negativity or is this case too specific? Let me know that and if there’s any other topics
you want me to make a video about in the comments. Like and subscribe if you feel like it, and
as always, if you have been, thanks for watching.