Friday, December 12, 2008

Soon, we won't be able to adapt to climate: Pachauri

The Economic Times (India): Very soon, the impacts of climate change will exceed our capacities to adapt to them, Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has warned. The head of the panel that has done more than anyone else to bring the effects of climate change - lowered farm output, more frequent and more severe droughts, floods and storms and a rise in sea level - to the forefront of world attention said: "The impacts of climate change are now so evident. If we don't take immediate action they will get far worse.

"And remember, poorest countries and the poorest communities in these countries are the most vulnerable to these effects." As the Dec 1-12 climate summit here stayed bogged down in bickering between industrialised and developing countries over who should do what to combat climate change, Pachauri warned: "Very soon, climate change impacts will exceed the adaptive capacities of local communities.

"We have to have a strategy by which the adaptation has to be local, while mitigation (to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases that are warming the earth) has to be global. The good news is that mitigation possibilities are not costly," Pachauri added. "There is now plenty of evidence to show that moving to a low carbon renewable energy development path is a win-win solution." ...

Pachauri at Davos, 2008. Shot by World Economic Forum, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 License

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