Climate Change Affects Poor the Most

From 24 hours, Wednesday, November 28, 2007, page 3, an article about the impacts of climate change that will unduly affect the poor:

CLIMATE CHANGE
Poor will suffer: UN

Rich countries must provide some $86 billion by 2015 to help the world's poor adapt to global warming, an expert United Nations panel warned yesterday.

The nearly 400-page Human Development Report comes just a week before a major new world conference convenes in Indonesia to negotiate a successor climate treaty to the 1997 Kyoto Accord.

It adds a dire economic perspective to previous UN scientific findings that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions must be stabilized by 2015 and then reduced.

Without the money, a warmer world "could stall and then reverse human development" in the countries where 2.6 billion people live on $2 a day or less, according to the UN Development Program panel.

Scientists have reported that temperatures have risen an average 0.7 degrees Celsius over the last 100 years, bringing the prospect of a century of extreme weather, rising seas, widening drought and disease and harm to fisheries, forests and farmland.

According to development officials, the consequences include women and young girls walking further to collect water in the Horn of Africa, people erecting bamboo flood shelters on stilts in the delta of the Ganges River in India.

"These impacts ... go unnoticed in financial markets and in the measurement of world gross domestic product (GDP)," the panel's report said.

"But increased exposure to drought, to more intense storms, to floods and environmental stress is holding back the efforts of the world's poor to build a better life for themselves and their children."
The Associated Press