Poor countries bear brunt of global warming's risks

The world's richest countries, which by far have contributed the most to the atmospheric changes linked to global warming, are spending billions of dollars to limit their risks from its worst consequences, such as drought and rising seas.

But despite long-standing treaty commitments to help poor countries deal with warming, these industrial powers are spending only tens of millions of dollars on ways to limit climate and coastal hazards in the most vulnerable regions — most of them close to the equator and overwhelmingly poor.

On Friday, a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N. body that since 1990 has been assessing global warming, will underline this growing climate divide — with wealthy nations far from the equator not only experiencing fewer effects but better able to withstand them.

Two-thirds of the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that can persist for centuries, has come in nearly equal proportions from the U.S. and Western European countries. These and other wealthy nations are investing in windmill-powered plants that turn seawater to drinking water, in flood barriers and floatable homes, in grains and soybeans genetically altered to flourish even in a drought.

In contrast, Africa accounts for less than 3 percent of the global emissions of carbon dioxide from fuel burning since 1900. Yet its 840 million people face some of the biggest risks from drought and disrupted water supplies, according to new scientific assessments. As oceans swell from melting ice sheets, crowded river deltas in southern Asia and Egypt, along with small island nations, are most at risk.

"Like the sinking of the Titanic, catastrophes are not democratic," said Henry Miller, a fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. "A much higher fraction of passengers from the cheaper decks were lost. We'll see the same phenomenon with global warming."

Those in harm's way are beginning to speak out.

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For an earlier article on the projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as well as a link to a summary of the first report, see

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"We have a message here to tell these countries, that you are causing aggression to us by causing global warming," Uganda President Yoweri Museveni said in February. "Alaska will probably become good for agriculture, Siberia will probably become good for agriculture, but where does that leave Africa?"

Scientists say it has become increasingly clear that worldwide precipitation is shifting away from the equator and toward the poles. That will nourish crops in warming regions such as Canada and Siberia while parching countries such as Malawi in sub-Saharan Africa, already prone to drought.

While rich countries are hardly immune from drought and flooding, their wealth largely will insulate them from harm, at least for the next generation or two, many experts say.

Cities in Texas, California and Australia already are building or planning desalination plants, for example. And federal studies have shown that desalination can work far from the sea, purifying water from brackish aquifers.

"The inequity of this whole situation is really enormous if you look at who's responsible and who's suffering as a result," said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the U.N. climate panel. In its most recent report, in February, the panel said that decades of warming and rising seas were inevitable with the existing greenhouse-gas buildup, no matter what was done about cutting future emissions.

Miller, of the Hoover Institution, said the world should focus less on trying to cut greenhouse gases rapidly and more on helping regions at risk become more resilient.

Other experts insist this is not an either-or situation. They say cutting the vulnerability of poor regions needs much more attention but add that unless emissions are curbed, centuries of warming and rising seas will threaten ecosystems, water supplies and resources from the poles to the equator, harming rich and poor.

There are hints that wealthier countries are beginning to shift their focus toward fostering adaptation to warming outside their borders. Relief organizations including Oxfam and the International Red Cross, foreseeing a world of worsening climate-driven disasters, are turning some of their attention toward projects such as expanding mangrove forests as a buffer against storm surges, planting trees on slopes to prevent landslides, or building shelters on high ground.

Some U.S., British and Japanese officials say foreign-aid spending can be directed at easing the risks from climate change. The United States, for example, has promoted its three-year-old Millennium Challenge as a source of financing for projects in poor countries that will foster resilience. It has just begun to consider environmental benefits of projects, officials say.

Industrialized countries bound by the Kyoto Protocol, the climate pact rejected by the Bush administration, project that hundreds of millions of dollars soon will flow via that treaty into a climate-adaptation fund.

The actual spending in adaptation projects in the most vulnerable spots, totaling around $40 million a year, "borders on the derisory," said Kevin Watkins, the director of the U.N. Human Development Report Office, which tracks factors affecting quality of life around the world.

The lack of climate aid persists even though nearly all the world's industrialized nations, including the U.S. under the first President Bush, pledged to help when they signed the first global-warming treaty, the Framework Convention on Climate Change, in 1992.

Under that treaty, industrialized countries promised to assist others "that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change in meeting costs of adaptation." It did not specify how much they would pay.

A $3 billion Global Environmental Facility fund maintained by contributions from developed countries has nearly $1 billion set aside for projects in poorer countries that limit emissions of greenhouse gases. But critics say those projects often do not have direct local benefits, and many are happening in large, fast-industrializing developing countries — not the poorest ones.

James Connaughton, President Bush's top adviser on environmental issues, defended the focus on broader development efforts.

"If we can shape several billion dollars in already massive development funding toward adaptation, that's a lot more powerful than scrounging for a few million more for a fund that's labeled climate," he said.

Robert Mendelsohn, a Yale economist focused on climate, said it might be necessary to abandon the notion that all places might feed themselves some day. Poor regions reliant on unpredictable rainfall, he said, should be encouraged to shift people out of farming and into urban areas and import food from northern countries.

Another option, experts say, is helping poor regions do a better job of forecasting weather. In parts of India, farmers still rely more on astrologers than government meteorologists for monsoon predictions.

Michael Glantz, an expert on climate hazards at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has spent two decades pressing for more work on adaptation to warming and has called for wealthy countries to help establish a center for climate and water monitoring in Africa, run by Africans. But for now, he says he is doubtful that much will be done.

"The Third World has been on its own," he said, "and I think it pretty much will remain on its own."