Developing countries take stand on climate
Pastor Dale Morgan
Thursday January 25, 9:21 PM Reuters
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Developing countries take stand on climate*
By Laura MacInnis
GENEVA (Reuters) - Developing countries stand to suffer the worst
effects of global warming, and should not have to pay for a problem
created mainly by the rich, executives and experts said on Thursday.
At a gathering of 2,400 of the world's most powerful people at Davos, a
ski resort in the Swiss Alps, leaders from emerging nations said they
wanted the United States, European Union and others in the West to be
more accountable for the heat-trapping emissions their cars and
factories produce.
They also asserted their right to stoke their own economies, even if
greenhouse gas levels rise as a result.
"The U.S., the Europeans, the OECD countries have for the last 30 to 40
years contributed to greenhouse gases much more than us," Rahul Bajaj,
chairman of India's second-largest motorcycle maker, Bajaj Auto, said on
the sidelines of the World Economic Forum.
His compatriot Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of the telecommunications
group Bharti Enterprises, said developing countries needed incentives to
react on climate change.
"We, as a billion people, are going to be consuming a lot of services
and goods that will create emissions. We will need technology, we will
need money," he said.
On the World Economic Forum's opening day on Wednesday, with falling
snow and chill winds ending a balmy start to the Swiss winter,
participants voted climate change as most likely to have an impact on
the world in years ahead, as well as the issue global leaders are least
ready for.
Politicians from rich countries have acknowledged the need for action to
address the consequences of global warming for developing countries, but
have made no major commitments to help.
POOR SQUEEZED
Barbara Stocking, director of Oxfam Britain, said poor countries were
particularly squeezed by growing calls to limit the use of fossil fuels,
which trap solar rays in the atmosphere, contributing to severe storms
and ecological damage.
They are also most vulnerable to global warming's effects, including
irregular rainfall, floods and droughts that have decimated fertile
lands and made subsistence farming difficult in much of Africa, as well
as Afghanistan, Haiti and elsewhere.
"We have already seen that the effects of climate change are hitting
poor people hardest and earliest," she said in an interview in Davos on
Thursday.
In addition to "big sums of money" that would be required to help
countries cope with these impacts, Stocking said emerging countries must
be allowed some slack to expand their industries and create wealth.
"We must not stop developing countries in their economic development by
imposing strict restrictions on carbon emissions that we do not have
ourselves," Stocking said.
Nicholas Stern, advisor to the British government on climate change,
agreed that international aid would be required to help the developing
world cope.
"This is not about stopping growth. It is about doing things in
different ways," he told Reuters Television on the sidelines of the
World Economic Forum.
Ensuring that emissions-saving technologies reach emerging giants such
as China and India, as well as poorer countries, is critical, he said,
adding: "I think that rich countries should shoulder the bulk of that cost."
Others said that more stringent monitoring of emissions from the Western
powers -- by far the biggest source of accumulating greenhouse gases --
would help assuage emerging nations on the need to act.
"Maybe we could have an international task force to have some sort of
enforcement for the countries that are committed in the Kyoto Protocol,
and also for the countries like the United States that are not committed
but must reduce their emissions," Brazil's trade and industry minister
Luiz Fernando Furlan said.
(Additional reporting by Natsuko Waki)