The ruling is better than nothing, in that it clears a legal obstacle, but economic incentives for conservation are still missing: <http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/Oil_Prices_1861_2006.jpg>.
A poor majority of the world are already paying and will continue to pay for the (past, present, and future) pollution of the rich few. What does it take to make the US government pay "a climate debt" spoken of below? A higher level of movement than one that could elect a leftist president, it seems to me.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/science/earth/03clim.html> April 3, 2007 The Climate Divide Reports From Four Fronts in the War on Warming By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Over the last few decades, as scientists have intensified their study of the human effects on climate and of the effects of climate change on humans, a common theme has emerged: in both respects, the world is a very unequal place.
In almost every instance, the people most at risk from climate change live in countries that have contributed the least to the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases linked to the recent warming of the planet.
Those most vulnerable countries also tend to be the poorest. And the countries that face the least harm — and that are best equipped to deal with the harm they do face — tend to be the richest.
To advocates of unified action to curb greenhouse gases, this growing realization is not welcome news.
"The original idea was that we were all in this together, and that was an easier idea to sell," said Robert O. Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale. "But the research is not supporting that. We're not in it together."
The large, industrialized countries are more resilient partly because of geography; they are mostly in midlatitude regions with Goldilocks climates — neither too hot nor too cold.
Many enjoy gifts like the thick, rich soil and generous growing season of the American corn belt or the forgiving weather of France and New Zealand.
But a bigger factor is their wealth — wealth built at least partly on a century or more of burning coal, oil and the other fossil fuels that underlie their mobile, industrial, climate-controlled way of life.
The United States, where agriculture represents just 4 percent of the economy, can endure a climatic setback far more easily than a country like Malawi, where 90 percent of the population lives in rural areas and about 40 percent of the economy is driven by rain-fed agriculture.
As big developing countries like China and India climb out of poverty, they emit their own volumes of greenhouse gases; China is about to surpass the United States in annual emissions of carbon dioxide.
But they remain a small fraction of the total human contribution to the atmosphere's natural heat-holding greenhouse effect, which is cumulative because of the long-lived nature of carbon dioxide and some other heat-trapping gases. China may be a powerhouse now, but it has contributed less than 8 percent of the total emissions of carbon dioxide from energy use since 1850, while the United States is responsible for 29 percent and Western Europe 27 percent.
Disparities like these have prompted a growing array of officials in developing countries and experts on climate, environmental law and diplomacy to insist that the first world owes the third world a climate debt.
The obligation of the established greenhouse-gas emitters to help those most imperiled by warming derives from the longstanding legal concept that "the polluter pays," many experts say.
"We have an obligation to help countries prepare for the climate changes that we are largely responsible for," said Peter H. Gleick, the founder of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security in Berkeley, Calif. His institute has been tracking trends like the burst of new desalination plants in wealthy places running short of water.
"If you drive your car into your neighbor's living room, don't you owe your neighbor something?" Dr. Gleick said. "On this planet, we're driving the climate car into our neighbors' living room, and they don't have insurance and we do."
Around the world, there are abundant examples of how wealth is already enabling some countries to gird against climatic and coastal risks, while poverty, geography and history place some of the world's most crowded, vulnerable regions directly in harm's way.
Here are four views of the climate divide.
Prone to Drought, and All but Unable to Predict the Weather
BLANTYRE, Malawi, March 29 — Twice a day, 25-year-old Harold Nkhoma checks a series of gauges at the government's weather station here in Malawi's second-biggest city.
He skips the barometer because its light doesn't work and he can't read the figures. He has waited six months for new batteries.
He ignores the evaporation pan designed to show how quickly water is absorbed into the soil. Peeled-off paint and missing wire mesh have left it useless. And he bypasses the glass sphere that measures the duration of sunshine by burning marks on paper strips. It has been out of paper for four years.
His supervisor, Werani Chilenga, is disgusted. Broken equipment, outmoded technology, slipshod data and a sparse scattering of weather stations are all that his national agency can manage on a $160,000 budget.
"We cannot even know the duration of sunshine in our country for four years, so how can we measure climate change?" said Mr. Chilenga, a meteorological engineer. "Oh, oh, it is pathetic!"
The lack of meteorological data is just one challenge as Malawi struggles to cope with global warming. Add to that a lack of irrigation; overdependence on a single crop, maize; shrinking fish stocks; vanishing forests; and land degradation.
Last March, Malawi, which has a population of 14 million people and is one of the world's poorest countries, identified $23 million worth of urgent measures it should take in the next three years. It delivered them to the United Nations program that helps poor nations deal with climate change.
A year later, the government is still negotiating with donors. "It is sad that up until now we have not gotten the monies that have been talked about," said Henry Chimunthu Banda, the minister of environmental affairs. That is not to say Malawi is standing still. The government is moving toward bigger grain reserves, changes in agricultural practices and construction of a new dam. Nine out of 10 Malawians are subsistence farmers.
Austin Kampen, 39, is an early adapter. A nonprofit group last year gave him hoses and a huge bucket — a rudimentary but effective crop sprinkler system.
He plants a variety of maize more likely to survive shorter growing seasons and backs it up with cotton, vegetables, potatoes and cassava.
He still lost his entire harvest in January when the river overflowed after a week of nonstop rain, submerging his seven-acre field and leaving 75 of his neighbors homeless. Still, he said, he will manage to plant anew this season.
Another farmer, Jessie Kaunde, also aims for resilience. But her bravest effort failed.
Armed with a $68 loan, she dug two fish ponds in 1999 behind her house north of Blantyre. Since drought struck three years ago, they are nothing but giant grassy pits.
"I am really disappointed," she said.
One reason is that other farmers have planted by the river that fed her ponds, causing the riverbanks to cave in and disrupt the water flow. Such planting is illegal but enforcement is weak, said Everhart Nangoma, an environmental specialist formerly with CURE, a nonprofit group focusing partly on climate change.
"Malawi is getting ready, but we are not there," Mr. Nangoma said. "We are not ready at all." - SHARON LAFRANIERE
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - Hide quoted text -
At Risk From Floods, and Defensless When the Rivers Rise
DHANAUR, India, March 28 —Year after year, the Baghmati river swells with the rains and, rushing down from the Himalayas, submerges this back-of-beyond village into utter ruin.
Year after year, it sweeps away cattle and goats. It sends mud houses collapsing back into the earth. It kills dozens of people in and around Dhanaur, and that's during a mild monsoon, like last year, when Pavan Devi's 19-year-old son, Vikas Kumar, went to a communal toilet in the fields and was swept away by a fast-moving stream.
In 2004, the last major flood, the death toll stood at 351 in Bihar state, which is home to this village and many others sitting on some of the most vulnerable floodplains in India.
Their vulnerability is likely to grow. Since 1950, in concert with global warming, monsoon rains over India have increasingly come as heavy downpours rather than gentle showers, Indian scientists reported last year. That pattern is raising the risk of sudden floods.
Cities are prone to peril as well: In 2005, 37 inches of rain in 24 hours crippled the country's commercial capital, Mumbai, killing 400 people.
The picture here in this destitute, crowded corner shows how ill-equipped India remains in dealing with that looming danger, despite its newfound prosperity. Nationwide, about 20 million acres of land are affected by floods each year, according to the government; they affect 4.2 million Indians each year on average, according to Columbia University.
Here in Dhanaur, for nearly three months of monsoon, everyone lives at the water's mercy. The well-off save their firewood and food grains for the annual disaster. The poor beg and borrow to eat, and they camp out on higher ground in tents made of cement bags.
They bathe and defecate in the floodwater. They drink from it, too. Who can afford to boil it before drinking, a father of six named Hira Majhi asked. With prices more than doubling during the rainy season, there is never enough money for cooking fuel, and hand pumps are routinely submerged. Last year, after his 4-year-old son contracted black fever, a deadly disease endemic here, Mr. Majhi rowed for an hour, in a homemade canoe made of water hyacinth leaves. No government ambulances ply here.
The most vulnerable to these annual floods are those who sit lowest on the pecking order. Mr. Majhi, for instance, belongs to a low caste group so poor for so long that they are commonly known as musahars, or the rat-eaters. He is landless. He works on other people's fields, usually only during the sowing and harvesting seasons. Because the land remains under water for so long, there is only one harvest each year. Floods and droughts hit families like his the hardest of all.
The measures taken by the government to adapt to the annual floods are rudimentary at best. Some parts of the road have been built with conduits underneath to let water pass, but the road itself is pocked with gaping craters, and locals say it is usually impassable for weeks at a time during the rains. No embankments have been built; construction upstream was suspended 30 years ago, though it is scheduled to resume later this year. Enterprising villagers have built bamboo bridges.
Last year, for the first time, the government put an early warning system into effect. Local officials went around with a bullhorn, on cycle-pulled rickshaws, warning of imminent floods. But there were no shelters to go to, except the local village school, where there was no drinking water or latrines.
In mid-March, the Baghmati rose up during an unexpectedly early spring flood. In less than a day, it wreaked havoc.
Sunil Kumar, one of the more well-to-do farmers here, lost three acres of wheat, a third of his annual income. He walked across his own soggy field and then across his neighbor's, examining patches of barley and mustard and peas — all waterlogged and ruined.
"It is our misfortune living here," he said. "There is no system of water control." - SOMINI SENGUPTA
-- Yoshie
