DEVELOPING COUNTRIES & GLOBAL WARMING

Implementing measures to reduce our role in global warming are expensive. This is the main reason that two of the worst greenhouse gases per capita, Australia and the USA, have refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. It is also why developing nations that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol are not expected to achieve the same reductions in greenhouse gas emissions as the richer developed nations are expected to achieve.

This has caused concern as countries such as India and China are growing very rapidly, with an expanding middle class copying the high consumption, fossil fuel-burning lifestyle of Westerners. If a large percentage of the developing world emitted the same huge amounts of greenhouse gases each year, global warming could rapidly spiral out of control. Developing countries point the finger squarely at developed nations, many of which have been emitting greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution.

Assistance for developing countries in combating climate change

Traditionally, economic growth tends to increase pollution as well as greenhouse gas emissions. In order to reconcile economic development with mitigating carbon emissions, developing countries need particular support, both financial and technical. One of the means of achieving this is the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The World Bank’s Prototype Carbon Fund is a public private partnership that operates within the CDM.

In July 2005 the U.S., China, India, Australia, as well as Japan and South Korea, agreed the Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate. The pact aims to encourage technological development that may mitigate global warming, without coordinated emissions targets. The highest goal of the pact is to find and promote new technology that aid both growth and a cleaner environment simultaneously. An example is the Methane to Markets initiative which reduces methane emissions into the atmosphere by capturing the gas and using it for growth enhancing clean energy generation. Critics have raised concerns that the pact undermines the Kyoto Protocol.

However, none of these initiatives suggest quantitative caps on the emission from developing countries. This is considered as particularly difficult policy proposal as the economic growth of developing countries are proportionally reflected in the growth of greenhouse emission. Critics of mitigation often argue that, the developing countries’ drive to attain comparable living standard to the developed countries would doom the attempt at mitigation of global warming. Critics also argue that holding down emissions would shift the human cost of global warming from a general one to one that was borne most heavily by the poorest populations on the planet.

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