ADB says climate change can hurt Asia's growth

International News Network Online (Pakistan): The Asian Development Bank (ADB) on Monday warned that without coordinated international action to help address climate change, Asia’s extraordinary growth and poverty reduction achievements of the past three decades will be undermined, and this in turn will hurt the global economy.

While speaking to the participants at the start of the United Nations (UN) Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations, ADBVice-President Bindu Lohani said that delegates gathering in South Africa for the next round of United Nations climate change talks must continue to put Asia and the Pacific at the forefront of global efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions and to help countries adapt to new economic and social threats.

“The region, with over 50% of the world’s population and two-thirds of its poor, is deeply vulnerable to climate change-linked events such as rising sea levels and increasingly severe droughts and floods,” said Lohani.

Participants at the 12-day event will be seeking to develop a new greenhouse gas emissions reduction framework to augment and replace measures under the Kyoto Protocol, which will expire in 2012. Delegates will also aim to launch a new Green Climate Fund for financing climate change action in developing countries, including programs to expand clean technology cooperation and adaptation to climate change impacts.

In 2010, more than 30 million people in Asia and the Pacific were displaced by weather-related environmental disasters, and that pattern is likely to continue and grow, especially in large coastal cities threatened by rising sea levels. Climate change impacts on water and food security threaten to undermine the region’s economic future and hurt the poor...

Floodwaters inundated Rojana Industrial Park in Ayutthaya Province, Thailand, in the 2011 Thailand floods, causing extensive damage to the manufacturing industry. US Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Robert J. Maurer