By: Katherine Nightingale
SciDev.Net: Poor countries will be most vulnerable to climate disasters from now
until 2030, researchers have warned. In the first model pinpointing exactly when
least-developed countries must receive adaptation funds from the industrialised
world, researchers have predicted that the number of deaths from climate
change-related disasters will be highest over the next 20 years.
After that they will subside as countries acquire the economic means to better
defend themselves. International organisations, including the World Bank and the
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), estimate that developing
countries need US$9–100 billion a year to adapt to climate change.
But exactly how soon they should receive those funds has not been studied until
now, according to Anthony Patt, a risk and vulnerability research scholar at the
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, who developed
the model with a range of international partners.
Their research, published this week last week in the Proceedings in the National
Academy of Sciences, used the number of human losses to natural disasters as an
indicator of a country's vulnerability to climate change.
The team created a statistical model to predict how many people might be killed
by natural disasters in a given country, using factors such as population and
level of development. Taking Mozambique as an example, they found that deaths
caused by natural disasters are likely to peak in 2030 if the country develops
sustainably. After this, they predict, the country will have developed to a
stage where socioeconomic development will begin to offset risk.
Less detailed studies of 23 other least developed countries followed a similar
pattern. "[The research] isn't saying that climate change isn't going to be a
problem — it's saying that, as countries' wealth changes, the inherent riskiness
of living in that country changes," Patt told SciDev.Net.
"In general richer countries are less vulnerable to natural disasters because
they put more money into civil protection [such as flood protection] and all
sorts of things that keep people from getting killed," he added. "So there's a
big shortfall [in funding] right now, between now and about 2030, where one
could see very fast rising numbers of losses to climate-related events."
Patt said that pledges made at the Copenhagen climate summit in December — of
US$30 billion a year between 2010 and 2020, increasing to US$100 billion a year
by 2020 — for both adaptation and mitigation are "about right". "By 2040 or 2050
it might be too late." But it is unclear how much of the money will go to
adaptation and how much to mitigation, he said.
"And the question is whether they actually do it — because there are a lot of
commitments that haven't been followed through." Patt admitted that there are
some limitations to the study, for example that it doesn't take into account the
magnitude of disasters, only their frequency. He also said that basing
predictions of future trends in disaster frequency on historical data — one of
the ways the researchers predicted human losses — was imperfect. Source: (SciDev.Net)