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CLIMATE CHANGE
NEED FOR INVESTMENT Developing Countries Need A Lot More Investment To Adapt To Climate Change 
An unidentified elderly man holding a bicycle through the flood on September 30, 2011 in Chiangmai, Thailand. CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK https://thinkprogress.org/developing-countries-need-a-lot-more-investment-to-adapt-to-climate-change-a114625e601d#.yrh4kb786 Open PDF: UNEP-Adaption-Gap-Report-2014.pdf Peter Burgess COMMENTARY ... added September 2022 The first report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was published 1n 1990. The observations below are related to the IPCC report published some 15 years after the first one. They are updated every year. It was already 10 years later when Al Gore raised the level of interest in climate change with promotion of the idea of 'An Inconvenient Truth' ... but nothing very much changed. I think it is worth asking the question why so much academic analysis and rigorous reporting about an important subject is essentially ignored by the world's business community and those that make investment decisions. Clearly when there is profit to be made, they move with alacrity, but otherwise they do nothing. My impression is that most of business leaders (and academics) have a poor understanding of risk and prefer to avoid the subject. Sometime in the early 1908s I embraced the idea that 'profit' was not the only thing that was important in the modern world ... for profit business has an important role in making the products and delivering the services that can make the world a better place. Doing consultancy work for the World Bank and the United Nations helped me better to understand this important idea. It was a little later that I started to realize how much of the world's basic food production depended on climate ... and that climate was changing and some of the world's most fragile food production systems were degrading. In the late 1980s I did a number of consultancy assignments in various countries in the Sahel region of Africa where multi-year draught was causing food insecurity at a scale worse than anything in living memory. It became clear to me that while change was slow and somewhat erratic, the overall trend was towards accelerating change and greater weather fluctuations that were a challenge to the status quo. I have had difficulty in understanding why so many people with relatively little knowledge have become believers that climate change is a hoax when I seem to have access to all sorts of data that shows climate change is real and climate change is dangerous. Eventually I realized that much of the 'easy' information about climate change was 'promoted' by people and organizations with a profit interest is the story that climate change is a hoax ... along the lines of the tobacco companies that promoted the idea that smoking was safe and did not degrade health. Both the coal industry and the petroleum industry have been putting profit before planet and people up to the present time, and what they are doing right now is tiny compared to what the should be doing. I would like to see some way for the industries that have done the environmental damage that is associated with climate change to have their profit ... past and current ... taxed in some way so that an international fund can be set up to invest in everything that is needed to ensure the susainability of the fragile world we inhabit. Peter Burgess | ||
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Developing Countries Need A Lot More Investment To Adapt To Climate Change
Developing countries will need to invest three to five times more in climate change adaptation by 2050 than previously thought, according to a new international report. Over the course of 2014, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its 5th Assessment Report, rounding up the latest science on climate change. That report estimated that, even if the world succeeds in holding global temperature rise to 2°C, poorer countries will still need to invest $70 to $100 billion every year between now and 2050 to deal with the rising seas, storms, droughts, and other forms of extreme weather events that will come. But the “Adaptation Gap Report 2014,” released on Friday by the U.N.’s Environment Program (UNEP), concluded the number is more likely $250 to $500 billion annually by 2050. According to UNEP’s press release, the earlier projections were derived from numbers provided by the World Bank. The new projections included “new national and sector studies in its analyses and modeling,” and was “produced in collaboration with 19 leading institutions and research centers.” “National authorities and the international community should take the necessary steps to ensure the funding, technology and knowledge gaps are addressed in future planning and budgeting,” said UNEP’s Executive Director Achim Steiner. “Of particular concern are the implications on least developed countries, whose financial resources for investing in development will need to be redeployed to financing adaptation measures”. “The report provides a powerful reminder that the potential cost of inaction carries a real price tag. Debating the economics of our response to climate change must become more honest.” The 2°C threshold is what scientist and policymakers have generally settled on to mark the point at which climate change will likely become a significant danger to human civilization. But the chances that the world will cut its greenhouse gas emissions fast enough to keep under that ceiling are looking increasingly slim — and the UNEP report said that adaptation costs could double again over the $250-$500 range by 2050 if temperature rise reaches 4°C. Furthermore, there’s reason to worry the effects of climate change could be considerably more severe than expected even if we hold to the 2°C pathway. Precisely because they lack the infrastructure and robust economic development of their advanced peers, poorer nations are both the most vulnerable to those effects, and the most in need of financial aid. Meanwhile, economically advanced countries like the United States, because they have so much more wealth per person, have far more room to invest in fighting and adapting climate change — and to help their neighbors do the same — without threatening their populations’ economic livelihood. “The report leaves no doubt, adaptation must be at the heart of a long-term agreement developed here in Lima,” said Jan Kowalzig, a policy advisor for the international development organization Oxfam, referring to a climate summit in Peru this week. That meeting is a run-up to international talks that will be held in Paris in 2015, where just what the international community will do to cut its emissions — and how far developed countries will go in aiding developing ones — will be hammered out. “Communities around the world are drastically unprepared for the costly impacts of climate change, which is already destroying lives and livelihoods every day,” Kowalzig continued. Measuring the “adaptation gap” is difficult, as UNEP acknowledges, because it has to allow for “differences in societal values and preferences with regards to determining a ‘desirable’ level of adaptation at local, national, regional and global levels.” It can also be hard to track private sector contributions and domestic spending by governments in poorer and less developed nations. That said, UNEP’s analysis concluded that between $23 and $26 billion was spent in 2012 and 2013 on climate adaptation by public sources, 90 percent of that in developing countries. So far, the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund has raised over $9 billion from advanced countries to help the developing world grapple with climate change. “This startling report opens up a window onto a nightmarish future, where the global economy is crippled and the most vulnerable countries are even further disadvantaged,” added Sandeep Chamling Rai, a senior global adaptation policy adviser at WWF, an international climate group. “This is not a gap, it’s an abyss. We can avoid falling into it, but we’re running out of time.”
| The text being discussed is available at | https://thinkprogress.org/developing-countries-need-a-lot-more-investment-to-adapt-to-climate-change-a114625e601d#.yrh4kb786 and |