DI Digest: Buenos Aires Update


	Financing Climate Change: Trend Watch: Buenos Aires Update

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The international community heard firsthand in Buenos Aires about the destructive effects of global warming. South Pacific islanders told the 5,000 delegates how inch by inch they are losing their homes to rising sea levels. Then there was the death toll (10,000 and rising) and devastation of Hurricane Mitch, the worst storm to hit Central America in this century. While a precise cause and effect between global warming and deadly storms like Mitch have not been conclusively established, there is already clear evidence that weather patterns are changing; that the intensity and frequency of severe weather events are increasing.

For delegates these two portents emphasized that the costs of adapting to climate change will be enormous, and that the countries least able to afford preventive measures may be the hardest hit.

Two events during the conference stole the limelight: Argentina said it would take on voluntary commitments at COP-5 and Kazakhstan announced it would take on obligations to abate greenhouse gas emissions, the first countries from the South to make such a pledge. Second, the United States signed the Kyoto Protocol, declaring that with Argentina' s shift in policy, it was satisfied that developing countries are now beginning to move toward meaningful participation in the Kyoto process.

The results of the Buenos Aires conference are hard to pin down, beyond agreement on an action plan to resolve ambiguities in the mechanisms of the Kyoto Accord by the year 2000. The task now is to put flesh and bones on such concepts as the Clean Development Mechanism, which offers a practical way for developing countries to benefit from the most advanced green technology.

While criticism was voiced in Buenos Aires that obtaining funding from the Global Environment Facility (GEF) in Washington, D.C. is a slow and complex process, the GEF' s mandate was reaffirmed as the main mechanism for funding climate change projects in developing countries. The question remains: are the donor nations sufficiently committed to the GEF to give it the funding it needs to do the job? Clearly, its present financial resources are woefully inadequate for the urgent task ahead. But as we have seen, there are many innovative ideas on the table to free and generate new sources of international funding.

Using the world' s fastest super computer, a global warming model at Britain' s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research has calculated that by the year 2050 the effects of atmospheric warming will be more widespread and costly than previously thought. The Hadley Centre' s model includes these predictions:

170 million people will face extreme shortages of clean drinking water
30 million Africans will face starvation because it will be too dry to grow crops
100 million people will be forced to leave their coastal homes because of flooding
Drought will turn parts of the Amazon rainforest into a desert, accelerating the warming of Earth' s atmosphere and land
Decreased rainfall on the American prairies will cut wheat and corn production by 10 percent

The study was released in November during the UN climate change negotiations in Buenos Aires and is posted on the Internet at: http://www.meto.govt.uk/sec5/CR_div/Brochure98/index.html

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