Sebastian Smith Yahoo News 25 Mar 10;
NEW YORK (AFP) – The planet is overheating, under-resourced, and almost out of time, but technical innovation and green economics could save the world, experts and leaders Thursday told an international conference here.
Video-linked panels in New York, Monaco, Mexico City, Beijing, London, Nairobi and New Delhi painted an alarming picture of global poverty and environmental degradation.
They called on the United States and other rich countries to show leadership, for example by investing in carbon capture technology and other long-term methods of reducing greenhouse gasses.
But developing countries, where pollution is growing rapidly, can also play a big role -- and at the same time lift their populations from poverty, they said.
"We can have prosperity this way, fighting climate change -- and a prosperity that will last a lot longer," Mexican President Felipe Calderon said by video link to the conference at New York's Columbia University.
Calderon said Mexico had ambitious plans to cut carbon emissions, replant forests and generate a quarter of electricity needs from renewable resources by 2012.
"I am further convinced that the first countries to change will gain considerable competitive advantages," he said.
Nitin Desai at the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi said India and China were also "both being very proactive" in pursuing low-carbon technologies.
Businesses are starting to exploit a "huge, huge market" for solar and other renewable forms of energy, he told the conference by video link.
Experts credited simple innovations, such as animal-powered electricity generators in rural India and the spread of mobile phones in Africa, for bringing opportunity to isolated communities, while greening the economy.
On a bigger scale, Achim Steiner, executive director for the UN Environment Program, said Africa should stop being a "mine" for rich countries and instead turn over its natural resources to sustainable industries.
"Agriculture, tourism, natural resources, forestry, these are the drivers of the economy today. So let's turn it around, instead of letting others take it out of here," he said from Nairobi.
"The green economy also applies the principle that we cannot go on polluting the way we do," he added. "Half the world's hospital beds are filled with people who are sick from dirty or bad water."
Glenn Denning, who teaches professional practice at Columbia, pointed to agricultural renaissance in Malawi as a model of a green economy helping to alleviate poverty and give populations a stake in their country.
"What we've seen in Malawi is that when you stimulate agriculture and boost agricultural productivity, people do start to make savings," he said. "One of the first things they do is buy a mobile phone."
The alternative to changing the world economy is to plunge into an ever deeper climate crisis, experts said.
They warned that public trust in global warming scientists was shredded last year when world leaders failed in Copenhagen to agree on a joint response and the underlying scientific arguments faced fierce criticism.
"What we have faced now is a crisis of trust, trust first in the science," Desai said.
Mark Cane, a climate sciences professor at Columbia said, governments and their public simply might not be ready to tackle what he said was impending disaster until too late.
"Pessimistically, it takes some kind of crisis, or some kind of threat that they feel really viscerally," he said in New York.
"I really think it's not going to happen until nature performs and we start to see the effects and people get worried," agreed Wallace Broecker, an environment professor at the university.
"If the Arctic ice disappears in 20 years, that will send a very strong signal that things are happening."
