Adapting to life under climate change, as these poor African farmers must do, will be far more expensive than previously estimated, according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme.
At Grist, John Light writes
Adapting to climate change will cost much more than we thought. An excerpt:
Poor countries will need at least twice as much money as we thought in order to successfully adapt to climate change—and possibly five times as much by mid-century. That’s according to a new, more comprehensive assessment by the U.N. Environment Program. The findings shake things up quite a bit.
Some history, real quick: Back in 2009, at the Copenhagen climate summit, rich countries agreed that they would need to do something to help poor countries deal with what centuries of spewing carbon into the atmosphere had wrought. The rich countries were largely responsible for said spewing, while the poorer countries only recently started spewing themselves, if they ever started at all. The U.N. agreed upon a $100-billion-per-year price tag—worked out over the next few summits based on calculations by the World Bank—for helping poor countries to adapt while developing their economies along sustainable lines. Wealthy countries agreed to start contributing that much each year by 2020.
But according to the new UNEP report, rich countries only mobilized around $25 billion between 2012 and 2013 to help poor countries adapt. This year, Christiana Figueres, head of of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, also set a goal of getting $10 billion into the Green Climate Fund, a mechanism for funneling funding to climate change–related projects in the developing world, and that goal has just been met. But these sums are only a fraction of the amount that countries are supposed to pony up six years from now. And now, using the new report’s figures for what adaptation will cost (somewhere between $200 billion and $500 billion per year), that fraction just got even smaller. Eek.
And there’s further bad news ...
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2004—Rummy feels their pain:
Rummie thinks soldiers in Iraq are girly men.
Army Spc. Thomas Wilson of the 278th Regimental Combat Team, which is made up mainly of citizen soldiers of the Tennessee Army National Guard, asked Rumsfeld in a question-and-answer session why vehicle armor is still in short supply, nearly two years after the war started.
"Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles?" Wilson asked. A big cheer arose from the approximately 2,300 soldiers in the cavernous hangar who assembled to see and hear the secretary of defense.
Rumsfeld hesitated and asked Wilson to repeat his question.
"We do not have proper armored vehicles to carry with us north," Wilson said after asking again.
Rumsfeld replied that, "You go to war with the Army you have," not the one you might want [...]
Tweet of the Day
Yes, torture "worked." It's how Cheney got someone to "confirm" Al Qaeda had ties to Iraq.
https://t.co/...
What defenders defending
— @emptywheel
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show: Much of the weekend (and this morning's Abbreviated Pundit Roundup), and therefore much of the show, was consumed by debate over the
Rolling Stone UVA rape allegations, their subsequent apology (but not retraction), push-back from other media, and then just outright nuttery, as highlighted by the
WaPo, and brought to our attention by none other than Ron Fournier. Turning to electoral politics,
Armando called in to discuss the outcome of the LA-SEN runoff, and the sort of reactions it sparked on the future of Dems in the South. The DNC launches its post-election review. Is it likely to yield decent results?
High Impact Posts. Top Comments