Reuters: When climate change really kicks in, poorer countries say they're going to need money for things like building flood barriers, helping farmers plant different crops, and boosting health services to combat malaria in places where it's not been a problem before. Funding for adapting to climate change is on the agenda at the latest U.N.-led climate talks in Bonn this week, on the path to a broader and tougher climate treaty that's being negotiated as a follow-up to the Kyoto Protocol. But development and environmental groups fear that six months after world leaders agreed to launch the process in Bali, progress is too slow."The world's poorest people are already paying the price of government inaction," climate change policy adviser Antonio Hill said in a press release from international aid and development agency Oxfam. "Governments have just 18 months to agree a deal and so far their approach has been half-hearted and non-committal." The agency estimates that between $1 and $2 billion is needed right now to fund the most urgent measures for coping with climate change in the world's least developed countries. And down the line, they'll need to pay to adapt in all sorts of ways, from planting mangroves along coasts to finding alternative jobs for farmers whose land's become too dry to work.
But Oxfam and environmental agency WWF - which wrote their demands on slips of paper and handed them out in fortune cookies to policy makers in Bonn - say rich countries have pledged less than 20 percent of this to the international fund set up for the purpose, and have delivered even less….
The Justice of Trajan, painted by Noel Halle in 1765, Wikimedia Commons
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