U.N. says rich must help poor nations to battle warming

RIO DE JANEIRO - The United States and other rich nations must begin giving poor nations billions of dollars a year for "climate-proofing" infrastructure and helping people cope with global-warming-related risks, or the world will face catastrophic floods, droughts and other disasters, according to a U.N. report released yesterday.

"The scenario is that our generation will experience reversals on a grand scale in the areas of health, education and poverty," Kevin Watkins, the report's lead author, told reporters in Brasilia. "For the future, there is real threat of ecological catastrophe."

By 2015, the report said, $44 billion a year would be needed to support developing nations' infrastructure, $40 billion to help the poor cope with climate-related risks, and $2 billion to strengthen responses to natural disasters.

The report said developed nations should pay the biggest share.

The Bush administration said in a statement that one of its top priorities was "to alleviate poverty and spur economic growth in the developing world by modernizing energy services."

The nearly 400-page Human Development Report comes just a week before nations convene in Bali, Indonesia, to negotiate a climate treaty.

At the report's release ceremony, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva called on rich nations to do their part.

Brazil is home to about 70 percent of the Amazon rain forest - the world's largest remaining tropical wilderness.

Scientists believe the rain forest can act as an enormous sponge to soak up greenhouse gases, but deforestation and burning releases millions of tons of carbon into the air each year, making Brazil one of the leading emitters of greenhouse gases.

The report also found that increased energy efficiency, alternative fuels, and even the reduction of trade barriers could go a long way toward reducing greenhouse gases.

It suggested a number of specific measures. On a macro level, however, the panel found that without money from developed nations, 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.

Developed countries, meanwhile, are failing to meet targets under the current climate treaty, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, for cutting greenhouse gases by 2012, the report said.

France, Germany, Japan and Britain have reduced their emissions somewhat, it said, but the European Union is falling short of its goal of a 20 percent cut by 2020.

Scientists have reported temperatures rose 1.3 degrees 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.

"These impacts . . . go unnoticed in financial markets and in the measurement of world gross domestic product," 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."

Detail and videos from U.N.

report: http://go.philly.com/earthEndText