Aid scarce for countries vulnerable to climate change

The Associated Press

BALI, Indonesia: Victims of climate change, real and potential, appealed Tuesday for a sharp increase in international aid to protect them from rising seas, crop-killing drought and other likely effects of global warming, and to provide them with compensation.

"We cannot wait. We need to do something now," said Rizaldi Boer, a climatologist in Indonesia, some of whose farmers are already suffering from unusual dry spells blamed on climate change. To date, the so-called Adaptation Fund, which is being developed under UN climate agreements to help poorer countries to adjust to a warmer world, has drawn just $67 million for a task the World Bank estimates will cost tens of billions of dollars a year. The nearly 190 nations assembled here for the annual UN climate conference are taking up the fund's future, among other issues, on an agenda aimed chiefly at launching a two-year negotiating process to seal a deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

That 175-nation accord requires 36 industrial nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a key source of global warming, by an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The United States is the only industrial nation to have rejected Kyoto. he European Union and others are seeking a post-Kyoto agreement that would mandate much deeper reductions by industrial nations - including, they hope, the United States - in carbon dioxide and other such emissions by power plants, factories, vehicles and other sources. Many here also want to see China and other major emerging economies take steps to curtail the growth of their emissions. The two weeks of talks promise to be difficult, with success far from guaranteed.

Operation, control and funding of the Adaptation Fund has been debated for years at these meetings of parties to UN climate treaties. The UN climate chief, Yvo de Boer, told reporters Tuesday that he hoped this meeting would finally make the fund operational.

The fund is expected to finance climate-change projects ranging from sea walls, to guard against rising oceans, to improved water supplies for drought-stricken areas and training in new agricultural techniques. All acknowledge, however, that the available funds are relatively paltry. The fund is financed by a 2 percent levy on revenues generated by the Clean Development Mechanism, the program whereby industrial nations pay for "carbon credits" produced by emissions-reduction projects in the developing world - credits that are then counted against reduction targets at home.

Those levies thus far are "tiny compared to the need," said Kate Raworth, a senior research with the aid group Oxfam International. Oxfam and other advocacy groups favor a broadening of Adaptation Fund revenue sources, perhaps to include aviation taxes or direct taxes on all fossil-fuel use.An Oxfam news conference was joined by a representative of the people of Papua New Guinea's Carteret islands in the far western Pacific, who are believed to be among the world's first "climate refugees."

As seas expand from warming and the runoff of melting land ice, they are eating away at tiny places like the Carterets, a sandy atoll of a half-dozen islands. Its 3,000 people are preparing to abandon the islands over the next several years, resettling on designated land on nearby Bougainville island.

Bill would limit power plants

New Zealand introduced legislation Tuesday to ban new fossil-fuel-burning power plants that burn fossil fuels for a decade. The bill also proposes a carbon-trading scheme for reducing greenhouse gases, The Associated Press reported from Wellington.

New thermal electricity generation above 10 megawatts whose fuel source is more than 20 percent oil, coal or gas would be banned under the 10-year plan, Climate Change Minister David Parker said. Already, 65 percent of electricity in New Zealand is generated from renewable resources, mainly hydroelectric plants.

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Kamis 21 February 2008, 07.39 pagi)

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