/ 4 December 2007

Adapt or die, warns UN report

The human rights of the world’s poorest people will be violated unless developed countries accept the need for drastic and immediate steps to prevent global warming from triggering dangerous climate change, the United Nations warned recently.

Calling for urgent action on a post-Kyoto agreement to reduce greenhouse gases, the UN said the risks of “ecological catastrophe” were increasing and called on the West to adopt policies that would cut carbon emissions by almost a third by 2020, and by at least 80% by 2050.

Kevin Watkins, editor of the near-400-page human development report, said at its launch in Brazil that climate change was about more than science or economics. “It is about social justice and the human rights of the world’s poor and marginalised. Failure to act on climate change would be tantamount to a systematic violation of the human rights of the poor.”

Saving the world’s poorest people from the effects of runaway climate change will require the West to display the political commitment shown by the United States in developing the atomic bomb or putting a man on the moon, the UN said this week.

In this annual report, the UN said the international community would need to invest two-thirds of what is currently spent globally on arms to prevent a build-up in greenhouse gases that would trigger a rise in temperatures of more than 2°C.

The report, released in the run-up to next month’s UN climate change conference in Bali, said vulnerability to climate disasters was heavily concentrated in poor countries, with 98% of those affected in 2000 to 2004 living in the developing world.

It warned that climate change could reverse attempts to tackle poverty, by reducing food production in areas such as sub-Saharan Africa, exacerbating water shortages in regions such as the Middle East, raising sea levels in low-lying countries such as Bangladesh and Vietnam, affecting fragile ecosystems, and damaging human health by increasing the chances of diseases such as malaria.

It said that rich countries would also need to increase aid budgets by $86-billion a year to help poor countries adapt to the effects of global warming.

The UN said the developed world had caused the problem of climate change and needed to take responsibility for cutting emissions.

Among the report’s findings were that the 19-million people living in New York state have a bigger carbon footprint than the 766-million people living in the world’s 50 poorest countries; Texas has higher emissions than the whole of sub-Saharan Africa; and the average dishwasher in Europe emits as much CO2 in a year as three Ethiopians.

The authors of the report argue that the poor “certainly deserve something more than political leaders who gather at international summits, set high-sounding development targets and then undermine achievement of the very same targets by failing to act on climate change”.

The report also takes a swipe at the media, saying that while immediate attention is drawn to droughts and floods, media reporting often gives the impression that climate-related disasters are here today, gone tomorrow, and does not track the long-term consequences of these events.

The UN is calling for the Bali conference to be far more ambitious than setting a timetable for tighter targets when the Kyoto protocol expires in 2012. “We can avoid 21st-century reversals in human development and catastrophic risks for future generations, but only by choosing to act with a sense of urgency.” — Additional reporting by Surika van Schalkwyk