CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - Climate change may be one of the biggest threats
to attempts to cutting poverty in the world's most deprived nations and
has forced the World Bank to reassess its development projects, the
bank said on Tuesday.
Studies
have shown that climate change and global warming linked to greenhouse
gas emissions will reduce economic growth, development and investment
in some of the world's most vulnerable nations.
"We are already
seeing the consequences of climate change ... we need to see how we can
help countries develop in a climate friendly way," Steen Jorgensen,
World Bank acting vice president for sustainable development, told
reporters in Cape Town at the release of a new report on climate change.
The
report, which looks at how the bank must react to this emerging
challenge to its development models, was released on the sidelines of
the Third Assembly of the Global Environment Facility (GEF).
The GEF is the world's biggest environment financing mechanism
that helps developing countries fund programs to promote biodiversity,
fight climate change and land degradation.
Global warming is
forecast to have a devastating effect on some developing countries as
rising sea levels wreak havoc on small island states and more frequent
and more severe droughts destroy crops on marginal agricultural land.
Poorer
nations, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where agriculture accounts
for about 70 percent of employment, would be the hardest hit.
The
World Bank said costs associated with global warming would eat into
development aid and projects, forcing donors to reassess spending and
infrastructure needed to help cut poverty.
"Several studies have
suggested that in the absence of adaptation, the annual costs of
climate change impacts in exposed developing countries could range from
several percent to tens of percent of gross domestic product (GDP),"
the bank said.
Continued...
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