It calls on countries to set clear targets at key meetings in Bali next month
By Nirmal Ghosh, Straits Times 28 Nov 07;
BANGKOK - THE United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) yesterday made a strong pitch for targeted cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, saying the world could not afford inertia.
Action must be taken now if the world is to avoid a worst-case global warming scenario, the agency said in its annual Human Development Report. It called for clear targets to be set at key meetings in Bali next month, saying developed countries should cut emissions by 20 to 30 per cent by 2020, and 80 per cent by 2050.
Developing countries could allow emissions to grow until 2020, and then cut them by 20 per cent from the levels they were at in 1990, by 2050.
Current global emissions are running at 29 gigatonnes per year. That needs to be halved to 14.5 gigatonnes per year - a sustainable level - for the rest of the 21st century, the report said.
Expecting developing countries like China, India and Brazil to start cutting emissions now would be unrealistic, the UNDP said - so they should be allowed to increase them until 2020 before capping and cutting them.
Two meetings in Bali next month - one of parties to the Kyoto Protocol, and another of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change - will set the agenda on combating global warming for years to come.
The historic meetings will see hard bargaining as governments come to terms with the necessity for cuts in greenhouse gases - especially carbon dioxide (CO2), the main driver of global warming.
Noting that global warming threatens sharp reversals in human development accompanied by abrupt and chaotic disruptions to ecosystems and agriculture, Mr Martin Krause, a climate change adviser to the UNDP, told journalists that 'seven out of 10 tonnes of CO2 (in the atmosphere) has been put there by OECD countries, so they have primary responsibility for reduction'.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) consists of the world's 30 most developed countries.
While calling for financing and technology transfer to help developing countries as they transition to a low-carbon economy, UNDP experts also pointed out that more developed countries in Asia could themselves become technology hubs.
Tackling climate change to cost 1.6% of global GDP: UN
Report calls on richer countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions
Business Times 28 Nov 07
(BRASILIA) Climate change could have apocalyptic consequences for the world's poor and tackling it will require cuts in greenhouse gases costing 1.6 per cent of global annual GDP, the UN Development Program said in a report yesterday.
Entitled 'The Struggle Against Climate Change' the UNDP report paints an alarming picture of the climate change problem and urges richer countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80 per cent by 2050, with cuts of 30 per cent by 2020.
The proposed reductions in emissions are 'stringent but affordable', the report said.
The report comes a week before delegates to a UN-sponsored conference on Bali try to convince the US to join a new emissions-limiting treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol that ends in 2012.
Between now and 2030, the average annual cost would amount to 1.6 per cent of gross domestic product of the world, said the report which was to be presented yesterday at a ceremony attended by UNDP chief Kemal Dervis and Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
'This is not an insignificant investment. But it represents less than two-thirds of global military spending. The costs of inaction could be much higher,' the report said.
On its first page, the document states that 'climate change is now a scientifically established fact. We know enough to recognise that there are large risks, potentially catastrophic ones'.
In the study commissioned by the UNDP, a panel of experts examined how climate change could play out, considered how to tackle the crisis and asserted the cost of fixing the problem will not be the same for every country.
'Those who have largely caused the problem - the rich countries - are not going to ... suffer the most in the short term,' the report said.
'It is the poorest who did not, and still are not, contributing significantly to greenhouse gas emissions that are the most vulnerable.'
Addressing the disparity in costs represents the most difficult challenge for policy makers and the authors warned: 'We should not allow distributional disagreements to block the way forward.'
An eventual rise of three degrees Celsius in global temperatures will bring drought, tropical storms and a rise in sea levels that will hit the economies of developing countries hardest.
'In terms of aggregate world GDP, these short term effects may not be large. But for some of the world's poorest people, the consequences could be apocalyptic,' it said.
In analysing possible steps to alleviate climate change, the report argues that the effort must include drastic cuts to greenhouse gas emissions along with adapting to the effects of global warming.
'Adaptation is ultimately about building the resilience of the world's poor to a problem largely created by the world's richest nations,' it said.
For poor countries, climate change will bring a deterioration in agricultural production, declining access to health and education services, and less access to markets - generating yet more poverty, it said.
The aim of the UN report was to encourage countries to confront the problem, said Ken Watkins, a member of the expert team that prepared the document.
'We are issuing a call to action, not providing a counsel of despair.
Working together with resolve, we can win the battle against climate change,' Mr Watkins said.
Meanwhile, Britain's leading employers' body, the CBI, yesterday urged the business sector to tackle climate change.
The Confederation of British Industry, staging the final day of its annual conference, has placed global warming at the top of the agenda with a flagship study on green technologies and working practices.
The conference kicked off on Monday with a report from its climate change task force, which called for concerted action from British businesses, consumers and the government to slash carbon dioxide emissions.
'We will do what it takes' to combat climate change, task force chair and BT chief executive Ben Verwaayen yesterday told delegates gathered for the CBI conference in London.
The CBI's task force comprises 18 chairmen and chief executives from well-known companies that together employ two million people.
The CBI's report contained pledges to develop green products and services, as well as a vow to save an extra one million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions among the employees of task force members within the next three years.
The study, based on data from consultants McKinsey, found that Britain's carbon reduction targets for 2020 were likely to be missed, but other goals could be achieved if urgent action were taken to adopt green measures\. \-- AFP
World Must Fix Climate in Less Than 10 Years - UNDP
Raymond Colitt PlanetArk 28 Nov 07;
BRASILIA - Unless the international community agrees to cut carbon emissions by half over the next generation, climate change is likely to cause large-scale human and economic setbacks and irreversible ecological catastrophes, a United Nations report says on Tuesday.
The UN Human Development Report issues one of the strongest warnings yet of the lasting impact of climate change on living standards and a strong call for urgent collective action.
"We could be on the verge of seeing human development reverse for the first time in 30 years," Kevin Watkins, lead author of the report, told Reuters.
The report, to be presented in Brasilia on Tuesday, sets targets and a road map to reduce carbon emissions before a UN climate summit next month in Bali, Indonesia.
Emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere help trap heat and lead to global warming.
"The message for Bali is the world cannot afford to wait, it has less than a decade to change course," said Watkins, a senior research fellow at Britain's Oxford University.
Dangerous climate change will be unavoidable if in the next 15 years emissions follow the same trend as the past 15 years, the report says.
To avoid catastrophic impact, the rise in global temperature must be limited to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius). But carbon emissions from cars, power plants and deforestation in Brazil, Indonesia and elsewhere, are twice the level needed to meet that target, the UN authors say.
Climate change threatens to condemn millions of people to poverty, the UNDP says. Climate disasters between 2000 and 2004 affected 262 million people, 98 percent of them in the developing world. The poor are often forced to sell productive assets or save on food, health, and education, creating "life-long cycles of disadvantage."
A temperature rise of between 5.4 and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (3 and 4 degrees Celsius) would displace 340 million people through flooding, droughts would diminish farm output, and retreating glaciers would cut off drinking water from as many as 1.8 billion people, the report says.
In Kenya, children 5 or younger are 50 percent more likely to be malnourished if they were born during a drought year, affecting their life-long health and productivity.
Countries have the technical ability and financial resources but lack the political will to act, the report says. It singles out the United States and Australia as the only major Western economies not to sign the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement signed by 172 countries to reduce emissions. It expires in 2012.
Ethiopia emits 0.1 tonnes of carbon dioxide per capita, compared to 20 tonnes in Canada. US per capita emissions are over 15 times those of India's.
PROPOSED ROAD MAP
The world needs to spend 1.6 percent of global economic output annually through 2030 to stabilize the carbon stock and meet the 3.6-degree Fahrenheit temperature target. Rich countries, the biggest carbon emitters, should lead the way and cut emissions at least 30 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050. Developing nations should cut emissions 20 percent by 2050, the UNDP says.
"When people in an American city turn on their air-conditioning or people in Europe drive their cars, their actions have consequences ... linking them to rural communities in Bangladesh, farmers in Ethiopia and slum dwellers in Haiti," the report says.
The UNDP recommends a series of measures including improved energy efficiency for appliances and cars, taxes or caps on emissions, and the ability to trade allowances to emit more. It said an experimental technology to store carbon emissions underground was promising for the coal industry, and suggested technology transfer to coal-dependent developing countries like China.
An international fund should invest between US$25 billion and US$50 billion annually in low-carbon energy in developing countries.
Asked whether the report was alarmist, Watkins said it was based on science and evidence: "I defy anybody to speak to the victims of droughts and floods, like we did, and challenge our conclusions on the long-term impact of climate disasters." (Editing by Mohammad Zargham)
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