Global warming impacts on World Bank programmes
About one quarter of World Bank development programmes may be at risk because of climate change, the organisation warned at an environmental summit.
Projects in small island states are already being affected because of rising sea levels and storm surges, which have affected the water supply and infrastructure, World Bank environment director Warren Evans said yesterday.
He said dry countries in sub-Saharan Africa also were bearing the brunt of the damage because of the impact of climate change on crucial farm production.
“A large number of projects we finance are at some risk of not succeeding because of climate change,” Evans said. A World Bank report on Managing Climate Risk said this could be as high as one quarter.
The report urged the international community to integrate climate risk concerns now in development strategies in order to safeguard economic growth and poverty reduction gains in the short and long term.
The warnings came at the opening of a conference of the Global Environmental Facility – a partnership with the UN Development Programme, the UN Environment Programme and the World Bank and the biggest source of funding for projects to combat pollution and promote sustainable development.
Governments on Monday pledged $3.1bn (€2.4bn) to the fund’s operations.
However, South African Environment Minister Marthinus Van Schalkwyk complained that the resource allocation was ”inequitably skewed,” with many African countries ”relegated to the margins.”
South African Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Nckuka said the fight against global warming should be as intense as the struggle against apartheid.
“It is about time that we get decisive on the importance and economics of saving the planet,” she said.
“This tip of the African continent is also potentially challenged by the impact of climate change, global warming, and with warming temperatures threatening the wine and fruit industries, and indications of declining rainfall also likely to have a significant socio-economic impact,” she said.
During the past century the global climate warmed by about 0.7 degrees Celsius because of human activities, with accompanying changes in rainfall patterns, extreme weather events, and sea levels, and another 1.4C-5.8C temperature rise is projected in the next hundred years.
This is expected to lead to an increased risk of floods, droughts and diseases such as malaria in many regions, falling agricultural productivity and damage to fisheries and many ecological systems.
The World Bank report said too much emphasis had been placed on mitigating the impact of climate change rather than adjusting to it, given its inevitability.
Evans said that far from being reduced, greenhouse gas emissions were likely to rise because of the rapid development of India and China – with China alone starting the equivalent of one new power plant per week. The United States, the world’s biggest producer of greenhouse gases, has refused to commit itself to targets to curb emissions.
“We are trying to help countries deal with risk of climate change today, then they will be in better position to manage and adapt in future,” he said.
But he said there was huge uncertainty. For instance decisions to build water dams were typically based on a century’s worth of hydrological data.
“That data doesn’t make any sense any more,” he said. ”We have to look to the future and guess what the hydrology will look like. Right now, the question is are we building the right thing in the right place at the right time.”
