UN: Poor Need $86 Billion in Climate Aid

UN: Poor Need $86 Billion in Climate Aid

By JOHN HEILPRIN

Associated Press Writer

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- 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.

--

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to

escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. -- Marcus Aurelius

"...the whole world, including the United States, including all that

we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark

Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights

of perverted science." -- Sir Winston Churchill

Joseph R. Darancette

daranc@NOSPAMcharter.net