Wednesday, 27 November 2007
Poorest countries to be hit hardest - UNDP report says human costs of climate change have been underestimated

In advance of a key climate change conference in December, when world leaders gather in Bali to try to agree to a successor pact to the Kyoto Protocol, the UN Development Programme today released its 2007/2008 Human Development Report which provides a stark account of how global warming could reverse progress in poverty reduction, health and nutrition.

Entitled ‘Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world’, the report argues that the potential human costs of climate change have been understated – particularly in the developing world. UNDP chief Kemal Derviş warned that it ‘is the poor, a constituency with no responsibility for the ecological debt we are running up, who face the immediate and most severe human costs’. According to Kevin Watkins, the report’s lead author, increased climate ‘shocks’ such as droughts, floods and storms offer a ‘one-way ticket to poverty’.

But the report is a call to action, not a catalgoue of despair. While acknowledging the threat from rising emissions from major developing countries, the report points out that rich countries carry overwhelming historic responsibility for climate change, have far deeper carbon footprints, and have the financial and technological capabilities to act.

The report’s authors assert that developed countries must demonstrate real leadership and cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80 per cent of 1990 levels by 2050. They should also close the gap between politicians’ rhetoric about climate and governments’ actual energy policies, and put climate change at the centre of international partnerships on poverty reduction.

The Human Development Report builds on other significant climate change reports, such as the Stern review and last week’s fourth assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Taken together, they provide an authoritative framework which lends credence to the call for urgent action to combat climate change.

Next month’s Bali conference offers governments the opportunity to create consensus on a framework for greenhouse gas emissions post-2012, when the Kyoto Protocol targets expire. The prospects for a comprehensive agreement at Bali were enhanced this week when Australia’s newly-elected prime minister Kevin Rudd announced plans to ratify the Kyoto Protocol immediately and to attend the UN conference.

Read the report here: Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world