Another inconvenient truth: poor
countries a big climate change threat
Dec 3, 2007
WASHINGTON - Even if the world's rich countries eliminated their carbon emissions
now, developing nations would still threaten the world with severe climate change within
a generation, says a new study from the Center for Global Development.
The research, based on newly available emissions data for 1850 to 2005, disputes the
notion that poor countries can defer worrying about global warming while building up
their economies, leaving the well-off that produce most of the carbon dioxide to solve the
problem.
"When I first ran these numbers, I found them to be pretty startling and depressing," said
David Wheeler, a development economist and lead author at the independent think-tank.
"This brought us up short. The survival of each region is now dependent on the other."
The study was released as a major United Nations climate change conference convened
in Bali, Indonesia, to work on a new international pact to pick up where the Kyoto
Protocol leaves off when it expires in 2012.
The United States is the only major industrialized country that hasn't signed on to Kyoto's
mandatory cuts of greenhouse gas emissions, saying it prefers a voluntary approach.
Canada has signed but the Conservative government thinks the goals are impossible to
meet and would cripple the economy. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said any new
agreement must impose binding, absolute targets and incorporate all the world's major
emitters, including developing countries like China and India.
The latest research supports the view that poor countries need to become more involved
to stave off an environmental disaster.
Cumulative carbon emissions in those parts of the world are already large enough to
jeopardize climactic stability, regardless of what rich countries do, Wheeler said.
In fact, emissions from poor countries will probably exceed those from rich ones soon
after 2025, said the study.
"We're both stuck in the same boat and it's sinking," he said.
There are a few major reasons why less developed nations are catching up to the
industrialized world so quickly on emissions, said Wheeler, including massive
populations and widespread deforestation.
At the same time, emissions from fossil fuels, the biggest source in high-income
countries, are rising rapidly in poor nations. And any last-ditch push to increase incomes
by burning more of them is a dangerous route, warned Wheeler.
The developing world "has been trapped by the sheer scale of its emissions at a much
earlier stage," he said. "(It) finds itself weighed down by a mass of humanity, as well as
the energy technology and fuels of an earlier age."
The centre recently released an online database that discloses the carbon dioxide levels of
all power plants and companies in the world. Taichung in Taiwan is the biggest emitting
plant, while Huaneng Power International in mainland China takes the No. 1 spot for a
firm.
If global emissions continue unabated, rising temperatures and sea levels, greater storm
intensity, reduced argricultural productivity and dwindling fresh water supplies will
undermine development in poor countries long before they even arrive at industrialized
emission levels, said Wheeler's study.
Projections indicate that by 2060, emissions from developing countries alone - 450 parts
per million - would push carbon dioxide over the threshhold associated with large,
irreversible impacts by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The group
shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize this year with former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore.
By the end of the century, the atmospheric concentration, at 600 parts per million, would
be well past the "extreme danger zone" for catastrophic climate change.
The numbers are conservative, said Wheeler, because they don't include other potent
greenhouse gases like methane or possible feedback effect from global warming, like soil
venting more carbon dioxide as temperatures rise.
"We now know that the task is even larger and more daunting than we previously
believed," said the development centre's president Nancy Birdsall.
"We in the rich countries need to cut our own emissions quickly and do much more to
help development countries shift to a low-carbon future while at the same time meeting
the just aspirations of their people for a better life."