UN: Poor need $86 billion in climate aid

John Heilprin, Associated Press, Yahoo News 28 Nov 07;

Helping the world's poor adapt to more floods, droughts and other changes from a warming planet will cost the richest nations at least $86 billion a year by 2015, an expert panel warned Tuesday.

"They must have help from the rich world," said Claes Johnasson, a co-author of the report commissioned by the U.N. Development Program. "Climate is forcing people into human development traps."

Half the cost, $44 billion, would go for "climate-proofing" developing nations' infrastructure while $40 billion would help the poor adapt how the live to cope with climate-related risks, says the panel's report. The other $2 billion would go to strengthening responses to natural disasters.

The report recommends the biggest share be paid by the United States and other rich nations, based on aid targets and financing calculations by the World Bank and Group of Eight major industrialized nations.

The Bush administration said in a statement that one of its top priorities is "to alleviate poverty and spur economic growth in the developing world by modernizing energy services."

The Human Development Report each year compares nations by life expectancy, literacy and other data. This year, it focuses on climate change, coming just a week before the world's nations convene in Indonesia to negotiate a new climate treaty.

It adds a dire economic perspective to previous U.N. scientific findings that carbon and other heat-trapping "greenhouse gas" emissions must stabilize by 2015 and then decline. Without the money, the panel found, a warmer world "could stall and then reverse human development" in the countries where 2.6 billion people live on $2 a day or less.

Scientists have reported that temperatures rose an average 1.3 degrees in the past 100 years, bringing the prospect of a century of extreme weather, rising seas, widening drought and disease and harm to fisheries, forests and farmland.

According to development officials, the consequences include women and young girls having to walk farther to collect water in the Horn of Africa, and people erecting bamboo flood shelters on stilts in the Ganges River delta.

"These impacts ... go unnoticed in financial markets and in the measurement of world gross domestic product (GDP)," the report said. "But increased exposure to drought, to more intense storms, to floods and environmental stress is holding back the efforts of the world's poor to build a better life for themselves and their children."

Olav Kjorven, head of the U.N. Development Program's bureau for development policy, called the financial aid a sort of "climate-proofing" for the poor that is only natural "when we know that the frequency of droughts and floods is going up."

Because of global warming, he said, 600 million more people in sub-Saharan Africa will go hungry from collapsing agriculture, an extra 400 million people will be exposed to malaria and other diseases, and an added 200 million will be flooded out of their homes.

The development panel says the greatest financial responsibility lies with the U.S. and other rich nations most responsible for the accumulating carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, mainly from man's burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels.

"We're suggesting 1.6 percent of (global) GDP — still very affordable," Kjorven said. "The countries of the world that are the principal culprits, if you wish, for creating this problem in the first place need to act strongly to safeguard the future of those that have done nothing to cause this problem but are the most vulnerable."

Developed countries, meanwhile, are failing to meet their targets under the current climate treaty, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, for cutting greenhouse gases by 2012, the report said. France, Germany, Japan and Britain have reduced their emissions somewhat, it said, but the European Union is falling short of its goal of a 20 percent cut by 2020.

"To say that the industrialized countries aren't meeting their Kyoto targets — that remains to be seen," said Annie Petsonk, a lawyer for the advocacy group Environmental Defense. "The targets only take effect for the years 2008 to 2012. The countries are getting ready for them."

Petsonk said developing nations' carbon-trading markets have the potential to generate large flows of private capital that could help provide much of the development money the U.N. recommends to help the poor adapt to global warming.

Rich and Poor Gird for Climate Change - UN Report
Raymond Colitt PlanetArk 28 Nov 07

BRASILIA - People around the world are preparing for floods, droughts and other natural disasters in ways largely dictated by wealth and poverty as evidence of climate change mounts, a UN report said on Tuesday.


Even if countries immediately took steps to cut greenhouse gases, global temperatures would continue to rise through 2050 due to accumulated carbon emissions, the UN Development Program said in its report. As a result climate disasters will be more frequent.

"All countries will have to adapt to climate change," said the report scheduled to be released in Brasilia on Tuesday.

Like many low-lying areas in the Netherlands, the town of Maasbommel is vulnerable to flooding from rising river and sea levels. Despite a sophisticated system of dikes, residents have built 38 homes able to float on water due to their hollow foundations propped up by steel stilts.

In Vietnam's Mekong Delta, one of the world's most vulnerable areas to climate change, people also are trying to cope with prospects of increased flooding from storms in the South China Sea during typhoon season.

They are being given life jackets and taught how to swim as part of a program sponsored by aid groups, the UNDP said.

The contrast between their bamboo stilts and earth dikes with the flood defense systems in Maasbommel illustrates how climate change "reinforces wider global inequalities," Kevin Watkins, the report's lead author, told Reuters.

'MORALLY WRONG'

While people in rich countries can rely on public investment, those in poor countries must largely help themselves, the report said.

"Leaving the world's poor to sink or swim with their own meager resources in the face of the threat posed by climate change is morally wrong," Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu of South Africa wrote in the report.

Britain spends US$1.2 billion annually on flood defense and is mulling an US$8 billion investment for the Thames Barrier. California, meanwhile, is investing in water recycling and efficiency.

The US state expects a reduction of snow in the Sierra Nevada mountain range, an important water source, by 37 percent in 2035-64, and 79 percent in 2070-90, the report said.

While the Netherlands has 14 weather stations per 10,000 square km (3,860 sq miles) to monitor climate and Britain has seven, African countries have less than one on average.

Still, some pilot projects in developing countries show that low-cost measures can make a difference. A simple monitoring scheme that informs farmers of rain, for example, increased productivity in Mali, the report said.

The UNDP urged rich countries to honor their pledges for climate change aid to developing countries. Otherwise they could face higher costs down the road.

"In the long run, the problems of the poor will arrive at the doorstep of the wealthy, as the climate crisis gives way to despair, anger and collective security threats," Tutu wrote. (Editing by Xavier Briand)