NYTimes.com: World Bank Report Slams ‘Inertia’ in the Face of Climate Change:
A major new World Bank report out today concludes that the world can fight poverty and climate change at the same time. But it won’t be easy, and it won’t be cheap.
The biennial global economic assessment, which this year focuses exclusively on the threat of climate change, estimates that nations will need nearly $500 billion annually by 2030 to both develop clean energy technologies across the world and cope with natural disasters.
Beyond the need for money, the “World Development Report 2010″ calls on governments, research institutions and individuals to overcome a worldwide “inertia” that the authors argue has kept nations dependent on fossil fuel and too slow to muster the resources necessary to solve a problem many still see as distant.
“We are particularly good at acting on threats that can be linked to a human face, that present themselves as unexpected, dramatic or and immediate,” the report warns. “The slow pace of climate change as well as the delayed, intangible and statistical natures of its risks simply do not move us.”
The sweeping report — which takes on everything from the need for climate risk insurance to avoiding deforestation — comes as nations are trying to finish a new climate change treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
While decisions could come at a U.N. summit in Copenhagen in December, climate change activists say meetings of world leaders planned in New York and Pittsburgh this month could prove critical to the pace of the talks.
Among the thorniest issues — second only to how drastically developed nations are willing to scale back their heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions — is how much money wealthy countries will deliver to the developing world.
See the home page for the report, where you can grab the whole thing in one 27 MB PDF or in much smaller portions.
I can’t help but notice the similarity between this report’s theme of international cooperation and the similar one struck by several authors in the current issue of Science, Economists, scientists warn that world crises require new order of international cooperation and enforcement.
The question remains, of course, whether enough of the right people in the right positions of power will listen and then act on the message.
