Activists urge rich to pay up to help poor adapt to climate change

Dec 4, 2007, 10:04 GMT

Bali, Indonesia - Environmental groups attending a UN climate change conference said Tuesday that rich countries pay little to help poor nations adapt to climate change and described such aid as an 'insult.'

The groups said developed nations, which have produced the bulk of greenhouse gases, should take the lead and take greater responsibility in reducing the emissions that cause global warming, adding that the international community would have to provide financial resources for the fight against climate change.

Charlotte Sterrett of Oxfam International said rich countries have paid 67 million dollars into a UN fund to help the world's poorest countries adapt to climate change, which is less then what Americans spend on suntan lotion each month.

'This figure represents quite an insult, to be frank, given that the least developed countries will need at least 1 billion to 2 billion dollars to met just their most urgent adaption needs,' Sterrett said in a statement at the gathering in Bali, Indonesia.

She urged delegates to honour their promises and increase their commitments to pay adaptation costs for poorer countries, which are expected to bear the worst effects of climate change.

'Bali need to tackle both cause and effect equally,' she said. 'Even if the world stopped polluting today, the worsening impacts of climate change will be with us for 30 years or more. That's why it is so vital that rich countries help developing countries to cope now.'

Delegates, environmentalists and scientists from nearly 190 countries began two weeks of meetings Monday on Bali to set a deadline for replacing the Kyoto Protocol, the treaty aimed at fighting global warming that was signed 10 years ago and expires in 2012.

The accord, which prescribes emission cuts for 36 industrialized nations, didn't require mandatory reductions for developing countries, such as China, which by some accounts surpassed the United States as the largest greenhouse gas emitter this year. The United States refused to ratify the Kyoto treaty, and many of the industrialized countries that did have failed to meet its targets.

Conference leaders urged delegates to move quickly to launch negotiations on a new climate agreement that many hope would be completed by 2009.

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) urged developed nations to take the lead and take greater responsibility in cutting emissions while other groups expressed doubts that developed nations would meet such a request.

'The devastating impacts of climate change reach across the globe, but in the near-term, those most at risk, and least responsible, are developing countries,' said Hans Verolme, director of the WWF's Global Climate Change Programme.

'It's the flood-prone megadeltas, such as Bangladesh, and drought-prone parts of Africa and Asia that are most at risk right now,' he said. 'The Bali summit gives world leaders a small window of opportunity to respond and agree to set deeper cuts in CO2 emissions.'

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this year said global emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases must peak by 2015 and drop by half by 2050 to avoid the worst effects of global warming, including rising sea levels and more frequent droughts.

One of the key focuses of the next two years of talks was expected to be who should participate in curbing emissions and whether the post-Kyoto pact would be mandatory or voluntary.

The European Union has called for signing a goal to reduce emissions by 50 per cent by 2050 already in Bali while the United States wants voluntary reductions.

Developing countries, including China, worry that binding emission cuts would rein in their economic growth and argue that they should be allowed to bring up their standards of living.

Experts said cobbling together a global treaty to slow the planet's warming might require an unprecedented agreement between the US and China.

Environmental groups, meanwhile, expressed concern about the engagement of industrialized countries in the first days of the Bali talks.

The Japanese delegation said nothing about the necessity of binding emission cuts in its first address at the conference, said Kyoko Kawasaka of Japan's Kiko network, while Steven Guilbeault of Canada's Equiterre criticized Ottawa for also not campaigning for binding targets.

'When the industrialized countries don't take a leading role here, who will?' Kawasaka asked.

As the summit host, Indonesia said it hopes that the Bali meeting could see an agreement on practical steps in assisting developing countries to develop their own adaptation strategies.

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the organizer of the Bali talks, reminded observers that there won't be a new agreement in place at the end of the two-week meeting. Rather, the task for delegates is to set a negotiation agenda for the next two years, leading up to a new deal in 2009, he said.