The people of Africa â the continent least responsible for climate change â are the most vulnerable to its effects and the least prepared, international climate negotiators said on Monday.
Some 6000 delegates from more than 100 countries are attending an 11-day meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, for their latest debates on the climate change convention and the Kyoto Protocol.
Top of the agenda is to finish setting up a fund to help poor countries, especially in Africa, to adapt to the droughts and floods ahead. âActivating the adaptation agenda is critical,â says Yvo de Boer, head of the convention secretariat.
Advertisement
A report from de Boerâs team on the vulnerability of Africa states that 30% of the continentâs coastal infrastructure, including cities like Dar es Salaam, Lagos, and Cape Town, are at risk of flooding from rising sea waters. The continentâs two biggest and most valuable wetlands, the Okavango in Botswana and the Sudd on the Nile in Sudan, may dry up, the report says.
Adaptation measures would include coastal protection, shifting to drought-resistant crops and providing assistance for ecological refugees.
The Kenyan environment minister and conference president Kivutha Kibwana warned that âclimate change threatens development goals for billions of the worldâs poorest people. We face a genuine danger that recent gains in poverty reduction will be thrown into reverse in the coming decades, particularly in Africa.â
Emissions rising
The conference meets as new UN data show that after a decade of declining emissions of greenhouse gases among industrialised nations covered by the Kyoto Protocol, emissions started to rise again in 2004. Spanish emissions are 49% up on 1990, the baseline date for the Protocol, and Canadaâs have risen by 26%.
De Boer said the conference had four main tasks: establishing the adaptation fund, finding ways to improve the sharing of low-carbon energy technologies, continuing discussions on what emissions targets to set after the Kyoto Protocol runs out in 2012; and developing carbon trading.
The main carbon trading system is the Clean Development Mechanism. This is part of the Kyoto Protocol. It allows companies in the industrialised world to gain âcarbon creditsâ by exporting technology for cutting emissions in poorer countries that do not have their own emissions targets. Projects range from wind power in India to cutting methane emissions from landfills in Brazil. Companies can use the credits to offset their own emissions at home.
So far, says de Boer, projects that will reduce emissions by one billion tonnes of carbon by 2012 have been approved. But, he says, few of the poorest nations have become involved. There are only four projects so far in the whole of Africa, he says â all in South Africa. Most projects so far are in fast-industrialising countries like China, India and Brazil.
âCDM goes where the money is,â says Steve Swayer of Greenpeace. âAnd Africa isnât where the money is.â
Protecting rainforest
Another topic likely to be up for discussion is a Brazilian plan to allow countries to benefit from protecting their rainforests. Around a fifth of current emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere come from deforestation. The Kyoto Protocol offers carbon credits for planting new forests, but few incentives for protecting existing forests.
A study prepared for the conference by the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development found that global deforestation could be halved by spending as little as $5 billion on providing incentives to forest owners to halt felling of trees. On 30 October, the Stern Review on economics and climate change said preventing deforestation was the most cost-effective way of protecting the atmosphere (see Top economist counts future cost of climate change).
But environmentalists warn that any such system would be hard to police. In Papua New Guinea, one country likely to gain from such a scheme, 80% of logging is currently illegal.
