International Herald Tribune
Floods, droughts and other disasters will rob millions of children of the decent meals and schools they need unless rich nations provide $86 billion by 2015 to help the poor adapt to global warming, an expert panel warned Tuesday.
The United States needs to cover $40 billion of that spending, which will "strengthen the capacity of vulnerable people" to cope with climate-related risks, says the report commissioned by the UN Development Program.
The Human Development Report was issued just a week before world leaders convene in Bali, Indonesia, to negotiate a new climate treaty. It adds a dire economic perspective to previous UN scientific findings that 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.
Developed countries, meanwhile, are failing to meet their targets under the 1997 climate treaty, the 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 money the United Nations says is needed to help the poor adapt to warming.
Scientists have reported that temperatures rose an average 0.7 degrees centigrade, or 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit, over 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 unfortunate consequences include women and young girls having to walk further to collect water in the Horn of Africa, people erecting bamboo flood shelters on stilts in the delta of the Ganges River, and others planting mangroves to protect themselves against storm surges in the delta of the Mekong River.
The impacts "go unnoticed in financial markets and in the measurement of world gross domestic product," the panel's 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."
China points to rich countries
Rich countries responsible for most of the world's greenhouse gas emissions should take the lead on climate change, a commentary in China's state media said Tuesday, Reuters reported from Beijing.
China is set to surpass the United States as the world's top emitter of carbon dioxide, the main gas that traps heat in the atmosphere, but it has resisted pressure to agree to caps or specific targets on its emissions.
The commentary, in the overseas edition of the People's Daily, argued that developed countries' "present per-capita rate of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions still far exceeds that of developing countries," and that "who should bear heavier responsibility goes without saying."
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