Poor & global warming @Earth_News @guardian

Poor @Earth_News must have the burden of global warming lifted http://bit.ly/iXzNqk @guardian



http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Poor must have the burden of global warming lifted

As the major polluters, wealthy nations have a responsibility to help developing countries survive extreme events

• Editorial
• The Observer, Sunday 5 June 2011

A couple of things are certain about the latest round of UN climate change talks that begin tomorrow in Bonn. The first is that any advance toward implementing a proper commitment on reducing carbon dioxide emissions will again be what used to be known as glacial. The second is that the climate in which these talks are being held is already markedly hotter to that in which they began very nearly 20 years ago.

You don't have to be a wheat farmer in Suffolk to know that we are not waiting for climate change to happen, as we liked to believe when the UN started talking in 1992; we are in the midst of it. Every year in this century has been warmer than all but one – 1998 – in the last. Last year, the second hottest on record, an unprecedented 19 nations set new all-time temperature records and, as one consequence, extreme weather events have increased both incontrovertibly and in line with prediction.

The only temperature that remains stubbornly cool is the political one. Governments – and, by extension, all of us – know what is happening, but still, it seems, refuse to believe. Since the Copenhagen summit of two years ago, even limited progress has stalled. Inaction has become once again, because of pressing economic crises, almost addictive. Last week's announcement from the International Energy Agency that CO₂ in the atmosphere rose dramatically in 2010, and at current rates will arrive the doomsday levels once predicted for 2020 by as early as next year, was the latest statistic to serve notice of that fact.

That the most polluting countries still have a responsibility to at least honour the Kyoto accord on emissions goes without saying. But much more must also be put in place to mitigate and avert the effects of warming that is already happening, and which, even with the most hopeful reductions, will continue to happen. The vast majority of extreme weather events associated with the change in climate devastate those populations that do the least to pollute the world. Recent figures suggest that of the 1.4 million people killed directly by weather disasters around the world over the past 30 years, 83% lived in low and lower middle income countries. That figure does not begin to include the many millions dependent on small-scale farming who have seen rains increasingly fall harder or not at all. Practical adaption to these realities is a burden that has to fall not only on the people experiencing them, but also on the nations that have done most to bring them about.

Research to be published this week by Nicholas Stern's Grantham Research Institute at the LSE makes clear that measures to share risks from extreme weather events – not only sea walls but also support for a greater degree of financial resilience in countries most affected – makes urgent and cost-effective sense. In 2006, Mozambique was refused a request for £2m from the international community to improve its flood defences. A year later, after severe flooding, more than £60m in post-disaster aid was granted.

Averting climate change is no longer a possibility, but its effects can be far better managed and predicted and its costs more equitably borne. The best protection against global warming remains the spread of the most sustainable technologies – in irrigation and agriculture and flood defence – and the more equal distribution of the kinds of resources – education as well as finance – that will allow those most vulnerable to its effects to survive.