New climate strategy: track the world's wealthiest

I'm writing a paper on this kind of stuff right now.

Reuters:

To fairly divide the climate change fight between rich and poor, a new study suggests basing targets for emission cuts on the number of wealthy people, who are also the biggest greenhouse gas emitters, in a country.

Since about half the planet's climate-warming emissions come from less than a billion of its people, it makes sense to follow these rich folks when setting national targets to cut carbon dioxide emissions, the authors wrote on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As it stands now, under the carbon-capping Kyoto Protocol, rich countries shoulder most of the burden for cutting the emissions that spur global warming, while developing countries -- including fast-growing economies China and India -- are not required to curb greenhouse pollution.

Rich countries, notably the United States, have said this gives developing countries an unfair economic advantage; China, India and other developing countries argue that developed countries have historically spewed more climate-warming gases, and developing countries need time to catch up.

The study suggests setting a uniform international cap on how much carbon dioxide each person could emit in order to limit global emissions; since rich people emit more, they are the ones likely to reach or exceed this cap, whether they live in a rich country or a poor one.

For example, if world leaders agree to keep carbon emissions in 2030 at the same level they are now, no one person's emissions could exceed 11 tons of carbon each year. That means there would be about a billion "high emitters" in 2030 out of a projected world population of 8.1 billion.

EACH PERSON'S EMISSIONS

By counting the emissions of all the individuals likely to exceed this level, world leaders could provide target emissions cuts for each country. Currently, the world average for individual annual carbon emissions is about 5 tons; each European produces 10 tons and each American produces 20 tons.

With international climate talks set to start this week in Italy among the countries that pollute the most, the authors hope policymakers will look at the strong link between how rich people are and how much carbon dioxide they emit.

"You're distributing the task of doing something about emissions reduction based on the proportion of the population in the country that's actually doing the most damage," said Shoibal Chakravarty of the Princeton Environment Institute, one of the study's authors.

Rich people's lives tend to give off more greenhouse gases because they drive more fossil-fueled vehicles, travel frequently by air and live in big houses that take more fuel to heat and cool.

By focusing on rich people everywhere, rather than rich countries and poor ones, the system of setting carbon-cutting targets based on the number of wealthy individuals in various countries would ease developing countries into any new climate change framework, Chakravarty said by telephone.

"As countries develop -- India, China, Brazil and others -- over time, they'll have more and more of these (wealthy) individuals and they'll have a higher share of carbon reductions to do in the future," he said.

These obligations, based on the increasing number of rich people in various countries, would kick in as each developing country hit a certain overall level of carbon emissions. This level would be set fairly high, so that economic development would not be hampered in the poorest countries, no matter how many rich people live there.

Is this a limousine-and-yacht tax on the rich? Not necessarily, Chakravarty said, but he did not rule it out: "We are not by any means proposing that. If some country finds a way of doing that, it's great."

This week's climate talks in Italy are a prelude to an international forum in December in Copenhagen aimed at crafting an agreement to follow the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. At the same time, the U.S. Congress is working on legislation to curb U.S. carbon emissions.

Economist: Migration and climate change - A new (under) class of travellers

Economist:

THE airstrip at Lokichoggio, in the scorched wastes of north Kenya, was once ground zero for food aid. During Sudan’s civil war, flights from here kept millions of people alive. The warehouses are quieter now, but NGOs keep a toehold, in case war restarts—and to deal with what pundits call the “permanent emergency” of “environmentally induced” migration.

Take the local Turkana people. Their numbers have surged in recent decades, and will double again before 2040. But as the area gets hotter and drier, it has less water, grazing and firewood. The drought cycle in northern Kenya has gone from once every eight years to every three years and may contract further. That means no recovery time for the Turkana and their livestock; the result is an increasingly frantic drift from one dry place to another.

A local crisis with local causes? Only partly. Scientists think it is part of a global phenomenon: people across the world on the move as a result of environmental degradation. Just how many are moving, or about to move, is maddeningly unclear.

The International Organisation for Migration thinks there will be 200m climate-change migrants by 2050, when the world’s population is set to peak at 9 billion. Others put the total at 700m.

These startling numbers may conjure up a picture of huge, desperate masses, trekking long distances and if necessary overrunning border defences because their homelands have dried up or been submerged. But at least initially, the situation in Kenya and other parts of east Africa is likely to be more typical: an already poor population whose perpetual search for adequate pasture and shelter grows harder and harder. In such conditions, local disputes—even relatively petty ones between clans and extended families—can easily worsen, and become embroiled in broader religious or political fights. And that in turn makes it harder for everybody in the area to survive, and more desperate to find new places to live, even if they are not far away.

A new report—“In Search of Shelter”—by the United Nations University, the charity CARE and Columbia University in New York lists the eco-migration “hot spots”: dry bits of Africa; river systems in Asia; the interior and coast of Mexico and the Caribbean; and low islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

A one-metre rise in sea levels could displace 24m people along the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong, Yangtze and Yellow rivers—which together support a quarter of humanity. A two-metre rise could uproot 14m people on the Mekong alone and swamp much of its farmland. Meanwhile, the melting of the Himalayan glacier will cause floods and erosion upstream, boosting the price of rice and other staples. And many regional conflicts could be exacerbated.

The scale of the likely population shift raises big questions. Will climate-change migrants be recognised? The classic definition of refugees—tossed between states by war or tyranny—is outdated. Eco-migrants will be paperless paupers, whose multiple woes are hard to disentangle.

Poverty campaigners want a revised legal regime to protect the new migrants. However, this looks tricky. America resists calling them “environmental refugees”: the word “refugee” implies guarantees that cannot realistically be given to the coming torrent of migrants. As American diplomats quietly admit, their rich country is still reeling from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which killed 1,800 people and displaced hundreds of thousands.

Can the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) expand to cope with eco-migrants? It has already struggled to widen its remit to include the internally displaced (26m at the end of 2008) as well as strictly-defined refugees (10m, excluding the Palestinians who come under another agency). A tenfold surge in the numbers within its orbit would push the agency out of control, says James Milner, a professor at Ottawa’s Carleton University. Meanwhile some aid workers see signs of a competition between institutions to take ownership of the eco-migration issue, perhaps by oversimplifying it.

Charles Ehrhart of CARE thinks UNHCR will remain central, but wonders how it or anybody can now distinguish between “forced” and “voluntary” migration. He says climate change may cut agricultural output by half in lowland Africa by 2020. “In such a context, does migration constitute a choice or a necessity?”

Migrants’ rights may be easy to assert for islanders whose homes are drowned—but hard in the case of big, messy movements across Africa and Asia. Most of the displaced will drift to the next-most-liveable place, as the poor do anyway.

“Many states are already overwhelmed by internally displaced populations,” says Mr Ehrhart. “Will they be able to support even more people on the move? If not, whose duty is it to make up the difference?”. At the least, the gap between carbon usage and climate change’s effects portends angry North-South rows.

Meles Zenawi, who as Ethiopia’s prime minister will speak for Africa at several global gatherings this year, predicts that some parts of the continent will become uninhabitable and “those who did the damage will have to pay.” At the December summit on climate change in Copenhagen, he hopes that Africa will “aggressively” demand compensation for environmental damage as well as help with migrants and the mitigation of climate change: in his view a demand of $40 billion would be reasonable.

Many agree that more research is needed to pinpoint the reasons why migrants pick up sticks. People concur that climate change fuels conflict in Darfur, but nobody knows how big a factor it is. Drought helped jihadist fighters seize bits of south Somalia, but was it the main reason?

Gloom abounds. James Lovelock, an environmental guru, posits a collapse in human population, in part related to migration, with a few “lifeboat” regions surviving. Then there is the pace of social change. The number of “megacities”—with populations in the tens of millions—may grow to several hundred by the middle of the 21st century. Most are poorly planned.

Would a migrant from a collapsed city receive aid? “We’ve not experienced anything of this kind, where whole regions, whole countries, may well become unviable,” says Jeffrey Sachs, head of Columbia University’s Earth Institute.

No wonder strategists see vast new security risks, and a big expansion in the world’s “ungoverned spaces”. But much can be done before the exodus turns biblical. In West Africa subsistence farming is badly irrigated. Improve that, throw in some seeds and fertiliser, scrap tariffs, build warehouses and roads, and the region may beat the worst of climate change.

Geographers at UN Habitat, a city-planning agency, say conurbations must adapt to the needs of climate-change migrants. “You can’t just stockpile people,” says Alex de Sherbinin of Columbia University. The pressure is tangible in Addis Ababa, which already has teeming slums. The price of teff, a staple, has surged after a famine that is still pushing people to the city. Mr Meles is not alone in his wrath.

Reuters: Climate health costs - bug-borne ills, killer heat

Reuters:

Tree-munching beetles, malaria-carrying mosquitoes and deer ticks that spread Lyme disease are three living signs that climate change is likely to exact a heavy toll on human health.

These pests and others are expanding their ranges in a warming world, which means people who never had to worry about them will have to start. And they are hardly the only health threats from global warming.

The Lancet medical journal declared in a May 16 commentary: "Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century."

Individual threats range from the simple to the very complex, the Lancet said, reporting on a year-long study conducted with University College London.

As the global mean temperature rises, expect more heat waves. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects 25 percent more heat waves in Chicago by the year 2100; Los Angeles will likely have a four-to-eightfold increase in the number of heat-wave days by century's end.

These "direct temperature effects" will hit the most vulnerable people hardest, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, especially those with heart problems and asthma, the elderly, the very young and the homeless.

The EPA has declared that carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas. is a danger to human health and welfare, clearing the way for possible regulation of emissions.

At the same time, the U.S. Congress is working on a bill that would cap emissions and issue permits that could be traded between companies that spew more than the limit and those that emit less.

RISING SEAS, SULTRY AIR

People who live within 60 miles of a shoreline, or about one-third of the world's population, could be affected if sea levels rise as expected over the coming decades, possibly more than 3 feet (1 meter) by 2100. Flooded homes and crops could make environmental refugees of a billion people.

As it becomes hotter, the air can hold more moisture, helping certain disease-carriers, such as the ticks that spread Lyme disease, thrive, the EPA said.

A changing climate could increase the risk of mosquito-borne diseases like malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever and various viral causes of encephalitis. Algae blooms in water could be more frequent, increasing the risk of diseases like cholera. Respiratory problems may be aggravated by warming-induced increases in smog.

Other less obvious dangers are also potentially devastating.

Pine bark beetles, which devour trees in western North America will be able to produce more generations each year, instead of subsiding during winter months.

They leave standing dead timber, ideal fuel for wildfires from Arizona to Alaska, said Paul Epstein of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard University.

Other insects are spreading in the United States, and while immediate protection is possible, the only real solution is to curb climate change, Epstein said in a telephone interview.

"You can tuck your pants into your socks and be very vigilant, but ultimately, if we don't stabilize the climate, it's going to continue to increase ... infectious diseases," Epstein said.

Carbon dioxide emissions, from coal-fired power plants, steel mills and petroleum-fueled cars, trucks and boats, among other sources, do more than modify climate, Epstein said. They also stimulate ragweed, some pollen-bearing trees and fungi, extending the spring and fall allergy and asthma seasons.

It is hard to quantify the potential financial cost of U.S. climate-change-related health problems, said Dr. Chris Portier of the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Some costs might actually decline if programs are put in place to cut greenhouse emissions from fossil fuels, which would also reduce some types of toxic air and water pollution.

Without cuts in carbon dioxide emissions, that pollution will remain, and the other unhealthy effects of climate change will continue, including more severe floods, droughts, heat waves and storms.

"You'll get more extreme weather events that will occur more frequently ... and so it just piles on in terms of the human health effects," Portier said. "And the cost will be tremendous, there's little doubt of that."

Yale Environment360: Adaptation Emerges As Key Part Of Any Climate Change Plan

After years of reluctance, scientists and governments are now looking to adaptation measures as critical for confronting the consequences of climate change. And increasingly, plans are being developed to deal with rising seas, water shortages, spreading diseases, and other realities of a warming world.
by Bruce Stutz

Adaptation. For many in the climate change community, the word has had a traitorous ring, implying that its proponents were giving up on the notion that the world might mitigate the threat of global warming by significantly reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. Adaptation was for quitters.

Not anymore.

With nations in the industrialized and developing worlds continuing to pump record levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, hopes are fading that over the next half-century atmospheric CO2 levels can be kept below 450 parts per million (ppm) and global warming held to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit). Now, a new sense of urgency has arisen as to how the world will adapt to a warming planet, where carbon dioxide levels could hit 600 parts per million and global temperatures could rise by 3 to 4 degrees C (5.4 to 7.2 degrees F).

“My view is that we’ll be lucky if we can stop CO2 at 600 ppm,” says Wallace Broecker, a geoscientist at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. “There’s no way we’re going to stop at 450. Impossible. If we’re going to double CO2, we’d better prepare what we’re going to do about it.”

If Broecker and many of his fellow climate scientists are right, the planet will experience myriad far-reaching changes to which humans, plants and animals will need to adapt: higher sea levels, the melting of glaciers that have long supplied hundreds of millions of people with water, drought-stressed agriculture, more severe storms, spreading disease, and reduced biodiversity.

“We’re talking about altering the world’s biogeography,” says Neil Adger, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the U.K.’s University of East Anglia and lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment of adaptation. “In extreme weather events, coastal flooding, wildfires, and droughts, the world is recognizing that predicted impacts are already happening.”

Major international organizations and governing bodies — including the European Union, the World Bank, and the IPCC — have called for the development of adaptation strategies. Prominent nonprofit groups also have announced major adaptation initiatives. Two years ago, the Rockefeller Foundation said it was creating a $70 million program to promote “climate resilience” (note the avoidance of the word “adaptation”) in the developing world. The Rockefeller program is designed to confront one of the major issues of adaptation: that the world’s poorer nations, which — with their low greenhouse gas emissions — have had little to do with creating the problem, may well be hit the hardest by global warming.

Last year, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced that it was committing $50 million to conservation groups to help them preserve biodiversity in eight ecologically rich “hotspots” as the world warms.

Stanford University climatologist Stephen Schneider points out that adaptation strategies are only beginning to be developed, mainly because there’s precious little science on adaptation and few working models.

“Everyone is now talking about adaptation, but for all the talk there’s little actually being done,” says Schneider.

Developing strategies to cope with the impacts of a warmer world will be complex and expensive. Oxfam estimates it could cost some $40 billion a year; the World Bank estimates it might cost more than three times that. While strategies and technologies designed to mitigate climate change can be applied globally — one less coal-powered plant in China has the same effect as one less plant in the U.S. — adaptation strategies must deal with regional and local geography.

In April, for example, a European Union report on adaptation said Europe’s most vulnerable regions to climate change will be southern Europe, the Mediterranean basin, the Alps, and the far north. Europe will have to adapt to the diminishing Alpine glaciers that now provide 40 percent of its fresh water. Africa, the western U.S., and Australia will have to adapt to intense droughts. Communities in the Arctic will have to adapt to melting ice and permafrost. If the Himalayan region loses its glaciers and monsoon patterns change, 40 percent of the world’s population will likely face severe shortages of water for drinking and agriculture.

To preserve ecosystems and endangered species, conservationists will have to adapt their strategies. And epidemiologists will have to adapt to changing disease vectors. Climate change will test not only the resiliency of ecosystems but also the adaptability of individual cities, villages, and societies.

CONFRONTING WATER SCARCITY
In the world’s sub-tropics, most models predict that wet regions will become wetter and dry regions drier, but there’s little agreement on how these trends will affect regional annual rainfall patterns and growing seasons. And it’s these that determine crop productivity. Farmers have always had to adapt to changing weather patterns. Climate change will exacerbate the uncertainties, both in the short and longterm. The key to coping will be to make farming as resilient as possible.

Researchers in Ethiopia, for example, found that many farmers had already recognized that temperature and precipitation changes were affecting their crops and altering the growing season. Once they were given access to technical support, credit, and information about future climate change, these farmers adjusted their agricultural practices. They changed crop varieties, adopted soil and water conservation measures, and changed planting and harvesting periods.

For researchers at the Rockefeller Foundation, future “simultaneous changes in temperature, precipitation, CO2 fertilization, and pest/pathogen dynamics” will require breeding new crop varieties, especially for those crops that feed most of the world’s poor. The reserve of genetic material now in seed banks may not be enough from which to develop new drought-, temperature-, or flood-resistant crops, and the foundation is urging new efforts to increase the world’s genetic reserves of seed crops.

Adaptation strategies are already underway to cope with changes in the world’s fresh water resources. In April, the European Union issued a dire warning about declining water resources. Temperatures in the Alps — “the water tower of Europe” — have increased 1.5°C (2.7°F) over the last 100 years, twice the global average. The glaciers are vanishing. At the same time, warming temperatures and drought have left southern Europe dry, with creeping desertification in Spain and Portugal. The EU is focusing on adaptation strategies aimed mainly at reducing demand through water conservation, introducing new methods of efficient irrigation, and reforming water pricing.

RISING SEA LEVELS
While scientists still debate predictions of sea level rise over the century due to climate change — with many studies predicting an increase of one to two meters — there is no doubt that rising seas have already begun affecting low-lying coastal regions. How humans adapt will depend not only upon regional geography, but regional development. The world’s large river deltas — the Mississippi, Nile, Rhine and Ganges — have been altered by development and agriculture, their tidal wetlands diminished and, with that, their resistance to flooding and erosion weakened, especially during storm surges.

That is why in the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta in Bangladesh, efforts are underway to restore lost mangroves to keep storm surges from flooding agricultural land and human settlements, and to keep delta land from washing away. At the same time, Bangladesh is trying to restore its upland forests to prevent downstream erosion. Islands, too, will hope to adapt to rising seas by creating or restoring natural buffer zones.

Things will be different, however, where coastal nature has already been lost to population growth and development.

By 2030, some 60 percent of the world’s population will live in coastal cities that may be increasingly subject to flooding from storm surges. Complex and expensive solutions will be needed to protect not only homes and people, but sanitation, communication, and transportation infrastructures. New York City, where the land is only 5 to 16 feet above sea level, has engaged a consortium of city agencies and researchers from Columbia University’s Earth Institute to develop adaptation plans to deal with sea level rises that could easily reach 1 ½ feet by 2080, as well as with increased tidal and storm surges.

City planners are modeling the risks and working with New York citizens' groups and city agencies to develop a coordinated approach to protecting vulnerable roads, tunnels, water supplies, transit, sewers, and water treatment plants. One firm has proposed a concrete tidal barrier that would stretch across the neck of lower New York Bay, similar to one that the Russian government has already commissioned to protect St. Petersburg from rising levels of the Baltic Sea.

THE SPREAD OF DISEASE
The greatest impediment to developing adaptation strategies to deal with the expected increase in disease due to climate change, is that “the regions with the greatest burden of climate-sensitive diseases are also the regions with the lowest capacity to adapt to the new risks,” writes Jonathan A. Patz of the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin.

In these places, disease is most often the result of poverty, overpopulation, lack of access to fresh water, malnutrition, and lack of sanitary facilities, all of which will be exacerbated by global warming. One concern of scientists is the spread of disease-carrying mosquitoes and other insects as temperatures rise, a phenomenon already evident in parts of the world. Climate change may also cause clean water supplies to dry up in small villages, forcing residents to collect water from streams and ponds contaminated by insects and pathogens whose fecundity and range may well increase in a warmer world.

River flooding can also contaminate water supplies. Gambia, for example, has undertaken a program along the Gambia River coastal floodplain to increase the number of improved pit latrines in school, health and community centers; to purchase fogging machines and sprayers for insect control; and to stockpile drugs and vaccines to deal with disease outbreaks. In Samoa, authorities are developing a program in which doctors and meteorologists work together to predict outbreaks of disease — such as mosquito-transmitted dengue fever — that may worsen as temperatures rise.

PRESERVING BIODIVERSITY
The most localized adaptation strategies may be best suited to deal with the effects of climate change on the world’s biodiversity. As habitats and even seasons are altered, species will be forced to adapt or migrate in what — by normal evolutionary standards — are very short time spans. They may follow expected adaptive pathways: Lowland species may move to higher elevations or migrate north, as some bird and plant species already are doing. In many places, however, migration routes are blocked by development or deforestation. Current nature reserve boundaries may no longer protect species forced by climate change to migrate. And while older trees that find themselves in an altered climate may survive, their seedlings may have a far narrower range of conditions under which they can thrive and thus be unable to grow in a warmer environment.

Enlarging the borders of established reserves will provide some species with protection while they seek out new ranges. Where reserves are hemmed in by developed land, efforts are underway to create wildlife corridors or preserve even small natural refuges — forests or wetlands — in the midst of cultivated fields. Such fragments of habitat may prove useful to birds or insects as their migration routes change.


As experts contemplate the challenges of climate change adaptation, they are stressing the need to proceed on sound scientific grounds. Without understanding the science, Schneider says, there’s every possibility of developing “maladaptations,” such as reacting to changes that appear to be caused by climate change, but that may be due to normal weather variables such, as El Nino, or to natural cyclical changes in species abundance.

For example, to implement irrigation after a few years of drought only to find that the longer-term forecast will be for a wetter — not drier — environment, is to waste a great deal of time, money, and good will. So would construction of a sea wall to protect against a mistaken prediction of sea level rise. Drought-resistant crops may be susceptible to new pests or diseases. That is why early adaptation studies have been aimed at understanding vulnerabilities, evaluating adaptive potential, and attempting to make people and places resilient to a possible range of changes.

Adaptation must also be finely tuned not only to the vagaries of local geography and ecology, but to local economies and cultures. Kate Barnes, climate program associate for the MacArthur Foundation, has found that cultural, economic, and political differences affect adaptation efforts to preserve the world’s montane biodiversity from the effects of climate change. In Bhutan, for instance, researchers found people’s “intrinsic appreciation for nature” made them more open to adaptation strategies than in Peru, where an interest in producing biofuels and gas exploration superseded an interest in conservation.

“The reality,” Adger says, “is that people don’t want to move and will resist adaptation when it affects things they care about — their jobs and their homes — even if they’re no longer sustainable.”

Commission on Climate Change and Development: Closing the Gap - Disaster Risk Reduction and Adaptation to Climate Change in Developing Countries

Just got out of a panel discussion with the leadership of the Commission on Climate Change and Development about their recent report entitled "Closing the Gap" about adaptation in the developing world. The panel was hosted at the BEAUTIFUL House of Sweden on the Georgetown waterfront which also houses the Swedish embassy. It was there because the Swedish Environmental Minister was part of the commission, and Sweden will hold the presidency of the EU for the next 6 months, during which the Copenhagen negotiations will happen. The head of WRI was also there, bunch of UN people, World Bank, etc.

I've just gotten through the executive summary, but it's a damn good summary of the changes and necessary steps for tackling climate adaptation and sustainable development. The seem to understand the inseparable goals of development and climate adaptation, and the necessary steps to amp up regular ODA. The give a comprehensive set of recommendations for every level of governance from the local and community level to the international multilateral.

More after I get through it.

Report in the Lancet: Climate Change is the Biggest Global Health Threat of the 21st Century

Climate change poses the biggest threat to human health in the 21st century but its full impact is not being grasped by the healthcare community or policymakers.

This report, compiled by a commission of academics from University College London and published in The Lancet, warns that climate change risks huge death tolls caused by disease, food and water shortages and poor sanitation.

The authors said that the NHS would face serious incremental pressures from heat and hygiene-related illnesses because of increasingly hot summers, greater pathogen spread with warmer temperatures, and the heightened risk of flooding.

Professor Anthony Costello, said that he had not realized the full ramifications of climate change on health until 18 months ago.

Describing the threat as a "clear and present danger" that would affect billions of lives, he said that the world needed a 21st-century public health movement to deal with climate change. He added that failure to act will result in future generations feeling the same moral outrage as is felt today towards those "who brought in and did nothing to stop slavery".

I've only gotten through the executive summary of the study so far, but this is a very insightful and comprehensive paper. This will have heavy implications for climate change adaptation and mitigation financing, especially in the developing world who will bear the brunt of global climate change. I read somewhere that along the India-Bangladesh border, Indian officials are putting up razor wire fences in anticipation of climate refugees attempting to flee Bangladesh.

I am meeting with some USAID officials on Friday to talk about shifting their climate adaptation funding into the public health funding, and this paper came out just in time to get me some credible arguments beyond my own BA in philosophy.

Full paper

Economist: Rainfall and GDP - How rainfall can affect economic growth

DEVELOPING countries are more at risk from climate change because of their dependence on agriculture, especially the subsistence sort with poor irrigation. Climate variability has a more severe impact on the economies in which agriculture is a large share of GDP. In Ethiopia, around 75% of the population are dependent on farming, which is almost entirely small-scale and rain-fed. A further 10% earn their living from livestock. During the famine of the 1980s, rainfall was well below average and growth plunged. Whether rainfall is an accurate indicator of GDP growth is another matter, however. This chart from the United Nations appears to show changes in GDP growth preceding similar changes in rainfall in certain years.