The Hindu : National : UNDP: help the poor cope with climate change risks

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Wednesday, Nov 28, 2007
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UNDP: help the poor cope with climate change risks

P. Sunderarajan

NEW DELHI: United Nations Development Programme’s Resident Representative in India, Maxine Olson, on Tuesday called for scaling up of efforts to assist the poorest in the country in adapting to the threats posed by global climate change.

Releasing a report brought out by the UNDP on climate change, she said that even as India had made a steady progress to improve the people’s health, education, and wealth, a large human development backlog still existed. Superimposing climate change risks on this deficit could increase inequalities.

The report, “Fighting climate change: human solidarity in a divided world,” emphasised that the impacts of climate change on poor people’s human development prospects around the world were significantly underestimated and warned that the world was drifting towards a tipping point that could lock the poorest countries and their poorest citizens in a downward spiral, leaving hundreds of millions facing malnutrition, water scarcity, ecological threats and loss of livelihood.

In India, the report said, changing rainfall patterns on account of climate change could result in drops in agricultural productivity, directly affecting 60 per cent of the population, which relied on the sector. The continued retreat of the Himalayan glaciers could increase water scarcity, affecting 500 million people in South Asia.

It recommended that $86 billion be transferred from the developed countries to the developing ones between now and 2016, considering that the former bore the responsibility for climate change.

Stressing that there was no hard and fast line separating the dangerous climate change from a safe one, the report called for a global carbon budget that would ensure that emissions of greenhouse gases dropped to sustainable levels. It recommended that the developed countries make deep and early cuts to their emissions so that by 2050, they were emitting 80 per cent less carbon than in 1990.

It also called for the setting up of a global climate change mitigation facility, which would provide finance for the incremental costs of low-carbon energy investments in the developing countries, consistent with achieving shared climate change goals.

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