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A United Nations expert panel said last Tuesday that the world’s poor need about $86 billion dollars to adapt to severe weather events caused by a warming planet and most of this money should be coming from the richest nations. Co-author of the report by the UN Development Program, Claes Johnasson said that “they much have help from the rich world. Climate is forcing people into human development traps.” According to the study, half the cost or $44 billion would go for climate-proofing the developing nations and their infrastructure and the other half would be to help the poor adapt to how they live. A small $2 billion dollars would go to strengthening responses to natural disasters. In a not so surprising recommendation, the report suggests the biggest share should be paid by the United States and other rich nations based on aid targets, financing calculations developed by the World Bank and the G8 nations. In the United States, the Bush administration said that one of its top priorities is ‘to alleviate poverty and spur economic growth in the developing world by modernizing energy services.’ This report was published, as it is done annually, by the name of Human Development Report. This Report compares nations by life expenctancy, literacy, and other data. This year, not surprisingly, the focus was on climate change. It adds a calamitous economic perspective to previous UN Scientific findings that carbon gases as well as other green house gas emissions must stabilize by 2015 and then decline. The report goes on to say that without this financial aid to the developing and underdeveloped world, the planet will become warmer and a stall or even reversal in human develop will be seen. A staggering 2.6billion people live in these poor countries where they live on less than $2.00 a day. The science of Global Warming has shown that the global temperatures have raised an average of 1.3 degrees in the past 100 years. Impacts like extreme weather events, rising seas, widening drought, disease, harm to fisheries, forests and farmland will have an unnoticed effect in the financial markets but will impact the economy of the poor countries more in the later future. Some other numbers from another expert claim that 600 million more people in sub-Saharan Africa will go hungry, 400 million people will be exposed to malaria, 200 million will be flooded out of their homes and a huge estimate of costs will go into the insurance payments for weather related damages. 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.
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