Climate Change

Posted in: Climate Change, Mitigation & Relief, Society & Communities
Human Development Report 2007-2008
By Andrew Palmer
Feb 21, 2008 - 7:47:01 AM

The world has less than a decade to change course.

The UN Human Development Report 2007/2008, "Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world", argues that the world is drifting towards a
“tipping point” that could lock the world’s poorest countries and their poorest citizens in a downward spiral, leaving hundreds of millions facing malnutrition, water scarcity, ecological threats, and a loss of livelihoods.

UNDP Administrator Kemal Derviş said, “Ultimately, climate change is a threat to humanity as a whole. But 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.”

The report was published after the IPCC's 4th Assessment Report and before the meeting in Bali to discuss the post-Kyoto agreements that will be required to combat climate change.

The authors of the Report call on developed countries to demonstrate leadership by cutting greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% of 1990 levels by 2050. The Report advocates a mix of carbon taxation, more stringent cap-and-trade programmes, energy regulation, and international cooperation
on financing for low-carbon technology transfer.

The Report also warns that inequalities in the ability to cope with climate change are emerging as an increasingly powerful driver of wider inequalities between and within countries. It calls on rich countries to put climate change
adaptation at the centre of international partnerships on poverty reduction.

The Report states that "Climate Change is the defining human development issue of our generation" and that it, "threatens to erode human freedoms and limit choice.  It calls into question the Enlightenment principle that human progress will make the future look better than the past."

The Report provides evidence of the mechanisms through which the ecological impacts of climate change will be transmitted to the poor. Focusing on the 2.6 billion people surviving on less than US$2 a day, the authors warn that the forces unleashed by global warming could stall and then reverse development progress built up over generations. Among the threats to human development identified by the Report are:

•  The breakdown of agricultural systems as a result of increased exposure to drought, rising temperatures, and more erratic rainfall, leaving up to 600 million more people facing malnutrition. Semi-arid areas of sub-Saharan Africa with some of the highest concentrations of poverty in the world face the danger of potential productivity losses of 25% by 2060.
  

• An additional 1.8 billion people facing water stress by 2080, with large areas of South Asia and northern China facing a grave ecological crisis as a result of glacial retreat and changed rainfall patterns.
  
  
• Displacement through flooding and tropical storm activity of up to 332 million people in coastal and low-lying areas. Over 70 million Bangladeshis, 22 million Vietnamese, and six million Egyptians could be affected by global warming-related flooding.
  

• Emerging health risks, with an additional population of up to 400 million people facing the risk of malaria.