Poor Nations to Bear Brunt as World Warms

The New York Times

April 1, 2007
Poor Nations to Bear Brunt as World Warms
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

The world's richest countries, which have contributed by far the most
to the atmospheric changes linked to global warming, are already
spending billions of dollars to limit their own risks from its worst
consequences, like drought and rising seas.

But despite longstanding treaty commitments to help poor countries
deal with warming, these industrial powers are spending just tens of
millions of dollars on ways to limit climate and coastal hazards in
the world's most vulnerable regions - most of them close to the
equator and overwhelmingly poor.

Next Friday, a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, a United Nations body that since 1990 has been assessing
global warming, will underline this growing climate divide, according
to scientists involved in writing it - with wealthy nations far from
the equator not only experiencing fewer effects but also better able
to withstand them.

Two-thirds of the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide, a heat-
trapping greenhouse gas that can persist in the air for centuries, has
come in nearly equal proportions from the United States and Western
European countries. Those and other wealthy nations are investing in
windmill-powered plants that turn seawater to drinking water, in flood
barriers and floatable homes, and in grains and soybeans genetically
altered to flourish even in a drought.

In contrast, Africa accounts for less than 3 percent of the global
emissions of carbon dioxide from fuel burning since 1900, yet its 840
million people face some of the biggest risks from drought and
disrupted water supplies, according to new scientific assessments. As
the oceans swell with water from melting ice sheets, it is the crowded
river deltas in southern Asia and Egypt, along with small island
nations, that are most at risk.

"Like the sinking of the Titanic, catastrophes are not democratic,"
said Henry I. Miller, a fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University. "A much higher fraction of passengers from the cheaper
decks were lost. We'll see the same phenomenon with global warming."

Those in harm's way are beginning to speak out. "We have a message
here to tell these countries, that you are causing aggression to us by
causing global warming," President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda said at
the African Union summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in February.
"Alaska will probably become good for agriculture, Siberia will
probably become good for agriculture, but where does that leave
Africa?"

Scientists say it has become increasingly clear that worldwide
precipitation is shifting away from the equator and toward the poles.
That will nourish crops in warming regions like Canada and Siberia
while parching countries - like Malawi in sub-Saharan Africa - which
are already prone to drought.

While rich countries are hardly immune from drought and flooding,
their wealth will largely insulate them from harm, at least for the
next generation or two, many experts say.

Cities in Texas, California and Australia are already building or
planning desalination plants, for example. And federal studies have
shown that desalination can work far from the sea, purifying water
from brackish aquifers deep in the ground in places like New Mexico.

"The inequity of this whole situation is really enormous if you look
at who's responsible and who's suffering as a result," said Rajendra
K. Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations climate panel. In its most
recent report, in February, the panel said that decades of warming and
rising seas were inevitable with the existing greenhouse-gas buildup,
no matter what was done about cutting future greenhouse gas emissions.

Mr. Miller, of the Hoover Institution, said the world should focus
less on trying to rapidly cut greenhouse gases and more on helping
regions at risk become more resilient.

Many other experts insist this is not an either-or situation. They say
that cutting the vulnerability of poor regions needs much more
attention, but add that unless emissions are curbed, there will be
centuries of warming and rising seas that will threaten ecosystems,
water supplies, and resources from the poles to the equator, harming
rich and poor.

Cynthia E. Rosenzweig, a NASA expert on climate and agriculture who is
a lead author of the United Nations panel's forthcoming impacts
report, said that while the richer northern nations may benefit
temporarily, "As you march through the decades, at some point - and we
don't know where these inflection points are - negative effects of
climate change dominate everywhere."

There are some hints that wealthier countries are beginning to shift
their focus toward fostering adaptation to warming outside their own
borders. Relief organizations including Oxfam and the International
Red Cross, foreseeing a world of worsening climate-driven disasters,
are turning some of their attention toward projects like expanding
mangrove forests as a buffer against storm surges, planting trees on
slopes to prevent landslides, or building shelters on high ground.

Some officials from the United States, Britain and Japan say foreign-
aid spending can be directed at easing the risks from climate change.
The United States, for example, has promoted its three-year-old
Millennium Challenge Corporation as a source of financing for projects
in poor countries that will foster resilience. It has just begun to
consider environmental benefits of projects, officials say.

Industrialized countries bound by the Kyoto Protocol, the climate pact
rejected by the Bush administration, project that hundreds of millions
of dollars will soon flow via that treaty into a climate adaptation
fund.

But for now, the actual spending in adaptation projects in the world's
most vulnerable spots, totaling around $40 million a year, "borders on
the derisory," said Kevin Watkins, the director of the United Nations
Human Development Report Office, which tracks factors affecting the
quality of life around the world.

The lack of climate aid persists even though nearly all the world's
industrialized nations, including the United States under the first
President Bush, pledged to help when they signed the first global
warming treaty, the Framework Convention on Climate Change, in 1992.
Under that treaty, industrialized countries promised to assist others
"that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate
change in meeting costs of adaptation." It did not specify how much
they would pay.

A $3 billion Global Environmental Facility fund maintained by
contributions from developed countries has nearly $1 billion set aside
for projects in poorer countries that limit emissions of greenhouse
gases. But critics say those projects often do not have direct local
benefits, and many are happening in the large fast-industrializing
developing countries - not the poorest ones.

James L. Connaughton, President Bush's top adviser on environmental
issues, defended the focus on broader development efforts. "If we can
shape several billion dollars in already massive development funding
toward adaptation, that's a lot more powerful than scrounging for a
few million more for a fund that's labeled climate," he said.

But it is clear that the rich countries are far ahead of the poor ones
in adapting to climate change. For example, American farmers are
taking advantage of advances in genetically modified crops to prosper
in dry or wet years, said Donald Coxe, an investment strategist in
Chicago who tracks climate, agriculture and energy for the BMO
Financial Group. The new seed varieties can compensate for a 10 or 15
percent drop in rainfall, he said, just the kind of change projected
in some regions around the tropics. But, he said, the European Union
still opposes efforts to sell such modified grains in Africa and other
developing regions.

Technology also aids farmers in the north. John Reifstack, a third-
generation farmer in Champaign, Ill., said he would soon plant more
than 30 million genetically modified corn seeds on 1,000 acres. It
will take him about five days, he said, a pace that would have been
impossible just four years ago. (Speedy planting means the crop is
more likely to pollinate before the first heat waves, keeping yields
high.) The seed costs 30 percent more than standard varieties, he
said, but the premium is worth it. Precipitation is still vital, he
said, repeating an old saw: "Rain makes grain." But if disaster
strikes, crop insurance will keep him in business.

All of these factors together increase resilience, Mr. Reifstack and
agriculture experts said, and they are likely to keep the first world
farming for generations to come.

Robert O. Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale focused on climate, said
that in the face of warming, it might be necessary to abandon the
longstanding notion that all places might someday feed themselves.
Poor regions reliant on unpredictable rainfall, he said, should be
encouraged to shift people out of farming and into urban areas and
import their food from northern countries.

Another option, experts say, is helping poor regions do a better job
of forecasting weather. In parts of India, farmers still rely more on
astrologers for monsoon predictions than government meteorologists.

Michael H. Glantz, an expert on climate hazards at the National Center
for Atmospheric Research who has spent two decades pressing for more
work on adaptation to warming, has called for wealthy countries to
help establish a center for climate and water monitoring in Africa,
run by Africans. But for now, he says he is doubtful that much will be
done.

"The third world has been on its own," he said, "and I think it pretty
much will remain on its own."

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