UNDP - Efforts To Help Developing World Meet Climate Threat "Woefully Inadequate" - BBC

[hatrack]

Efforts to help developing nations adapt to the impacts of climate change have been called "woefully inadequate" by a UN-commissioned report. Rich countries have focused on ways to reduce carbon emissions but have largely ignored helping poor nations cope with the consequences, it says.

The findings appear in the UNDP's Human Development Report 2006. The authors say farmers whose crops are reliant on rainfall are already having to cope with unpredictable weather. The report, called Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis, says climate change "now poses what may be an unparalleled threat to human development".

Lead author Kevin Watkins said people living in vulnerable conditions were already having to adapt. "There is a lot of evidence that the droughts in the Horn of Africa this year are connected to climate change," he told reporters. "This is not an issue for 50 years down the road, it is an issue for today."

Mr Watkins added that the worst affected areas were regions with very limited water infrastructures, such as Sub-Saharan Africa. "It is not a region that has the irrigation capacity or the water harvesting capacity to store water in ways that can smooth out irregularities in supply," he observed. "More than 90% of people living in rural Sub-Saharan Africa are dependent on rain-fed agriculture, so what happens to rain and moisture content in the soil has very profound and immediate implications for poverty."

EDIT

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6126242.stm