On 1 March the government increased electricity prices by a record 15 percent to an average 1,242 dong (US 6 cents) per kilowatt per hour. The week before, petrol prices were raised by 18 percent to 19,300 dong (93 cents) per litre.

In Vietnam, inflation has increased every month since August 2010, reaching 12.2 percent in January.

“Things are getting really uncertain,” said Nguyen Bich Hanh, 25, a public school teacher who lives on the outskirts of the capital, Ho Chi Minh City. “We are struggling to pay for electricity, and food [prices are] getting extreme.”

In the past two months, Nguyen said the price of high-quality rice, for example, had increased by almost one-third to 22,000 dong ($1.13) per kilogramme.

She earns $150 a month and spends most of it on food and transportation for her family of five.

The World Bank ranks Vietnam as a lower middle-income country. Still, worries about poverty run deep in a country where 80 percent of the population lives in rural areas and most of the workforce is agricultural.

Half the population lives on less than $2 a day, and many could slide into poverty because of economic shocks and natural disasters, according to AusAID, the Australian government’s aid agency.

Nguyen saves money by turning off the electricity at home at all times, and increasingly, by skipping meals.

“Fewer kids are coming to school because they need to help their families,” she said.

Coping

Sudden price fluctuations are forcing Vietnam’s poorest to find quick and creative ways of coping, said Ben Kerkvliet, a Vietnam scholar at the Canberra-based Australian National University.

“Many rural households in Vietnam have small gardens, small fish ponds or other aqua-raising opportunities, chickens or ducks… that help to feed their families,” he told IRIN. “In hard times, these sources of food become even more important.

“Youngsters in the household may go to school without school supplies. They may have to quit school altogether,” he added. So far, Vietnam has performed well in enrolling students in primary school and keeping them there.

In 2009, net enrolment in primary school was 97 percent and 88.5 percent of children who enter primary school complete at least five years, according to the UN office in Vietnam.

But should inflation increase sharply beyond current levels, said Kerkvliet, general stability could slide. “Should shortages of key commodities like rice and wheat become extreme, villagers are likely to protest in various parts of the country,” he said. “At present levels of inflation, the likely political change will be policies aimed at addressing the problems.”

This year, the government hopes to limit inflation to 7 percent, compared with 11.75 percent last year.

For Nguyen, poverty is more pressing than numbers on paper. “They say our country is becoming richer,” she said, “but this does not matter if regular people cannot afford anything.”

Climate change may be hitting home. Rises in global average temperature are remote from most people’s experience, but two studies in this week’s Nature1,2 conclude that climate warming is already causing extreme weather events that affect the lives of millions. The research directly links rising greenhouse-gas levels with the growing intensity of rain and snow in the Northern Hemisphere, and the increased risk of flooding in the United Kingdom.

Insurers will take note, as will those developing policies for adapting to climate change. “This has immense importance not just as a further justification for emissions reduction, but also for adaptation planning,” says Michael Oppenheimer, a climate-policy researcher at Princeton University in New Jersey, who was not involved in the studies.

There is no doubt that humans are altering the climate, but the implications for regional weather are less clear. No computer simulation can conclusively attribute a given snowstorm or flood to global warming. But with a combination of climate models, weather observations and a good dose of probability theory, scientists may be able to determine how climate warming changes the odds. An earlier study3, for example, found that global warming has at least doubled the likelihood of extreme events such as the 2003 European heatwave.

More-localized weather extremes have been harder to attribute to climate change until now. “Climate models have improved a lot since ten years ago, when we basically couldn’t say anything about rainfall,” says Gabriele Hegerl, a climate researcher at the University of Edinburgh, UK. In the first of the latest studies1, Hegerl and her colleagues compared data from weather stations in the Northern Hemisphere with precipitation simulations from eight climate models (see page 378). “We can now say with some confidence that the increased rainfall intensity in the latter half of the twentieth century cannot be explained by our estimates of internal climate variability,” she says.

The second study2 links climate change to a specific event: damaging floods in 2000 in England and Wales. By running thousands of high-resolution seasonal forecast simulations with or without the effect of greenhouse gases, Myles Allen of the University of Oxford, UK, and his colleagues found that anthropogenic climate change may have almost doubled the risk of the extremely wet weather that caused the floods (see page 382). The rise in extreme precipitation in some Northern Hemisphere areas has been recognized for more than a decade, but this is the first time that the anthropogenic contribution has been nailed down, says Oppenheimer. The findings mean that Northern Hemisphere countries need to prepare for more of these events in the future. “What has been considered a 1-in-100-years event in a stationary climate may actually occur twice as often in the future,” says Allen.

But he cautions that climate change may not always raise the risk of weather-related damage. In Britain, for example, snow-melt floods may become less likely as the climate warms. And Allen’s study leaves a 10% chance that global warming has not affected — or has even decreased — the country’s flood risk.

Similar attribution studies are under way for flood and drought risk in Europe, meltwater availability in the western United States and drought in southern Africa, typical of the research needed to develop effective climate-adaptation policies. “Governments plan to spend some US$100 billion on climate adaptation by 2020, although presently no one has an idea of what is an impact of climate change and what is just bad weather,” says Allen.

Establishing the links between climate change and weather could also shape climate treaties, he says. “If rich countries are to financially compensate the losers of climate change, as some poorer countries would expect, you’d like to have an objective scientific basis for it.”

The insurance industry has long worried about increased losses resulting from more extreme weather (see ‘Fatal floods’), but conclusively pinning the blame on climate change will take more research, says Robert Muir-Wood, chief research officer with RMS, a company headquartered in Newark, California, that constructs risk models for the insurance industry. “This is a key part of our research agenda and insurance companies do accept the premise” that there could be a link, he says. “If there’s evidence that risk is changing, then this is something we need to incorporate in our models.”
See Article in Nature
  *
    References
      1. Min, S.-K. et al. Nature 470, 378-381 (2011). | Article
      2. Pall, P. et al. Nature 470, 382-385 (2011). | Article
      3. Stott, P. A. et al. Nature 432, 610-614

In the end, Bolivia’s continued objections were drowned out by applause and cheering by more than 190 national delegations as the chair of the meeting, Mexico’s foreign secretary Patricia Espinosa, gaveled the meeting to a close declaring “a consensus without Bolivia”.

“The Cancún text is a hollow and false victory that was imposed without consensus,” Bolivia said in a final statement.

Based on the science, Bolivia is not wrong. The World Meteorological Organisation declared last week that the decade will close as the hottest 10- year period on record. The 100+ pages that form the “Cancún Agreements” will do nothing to curb greenhouse gas emissions warming the planet, but did revive the U.N. climate negotiation process after its near death in Copenhagen last year.

And most here believe this agreement sets the stage for a substantive agreement at the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP) of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Durban next December.

“I can’t disagree with Bolivia that based on the science, this agreement as it stands means four degrees C of warming,” said Kumi Naidoo, executive director of Greenpeace.

“The text of the agreement is not good enough, but it does save the process and maybe this gets us to a truly fair, ambitious and balanced treaty in Durban,” Naidoo told TerraViva.

“Governments have given a clear signal that they are headed towards a low- emissions future together,” declared UNFCCC executive secretary Christiana Figueres. The Cancún Agreements represent “the essential foundation on which to build greater, collective ambition”, Figueres said in a statement.

“It’s pathetic the world community struggles so much just to climb over such a low bar,” commented Naidoo, whose hometown is Durban, South Africa. “Our only real hope is to mobilise a broad-based climate movement involving all sectors of the public and civil society before Durban.”

Late Friday night in the hallways, the mood was surprisingly upbeat. Not only had the talks not collapsed, there was formal agreement on a number of issues. These included acknowledgement that emissions cuts needed to be in line with the science ­ 25 to 40 percent cuts by 2020 - and the global temperature rise target should be kept below two degrees C instead of at two degrees C as the target in the Copenhagen Accord.

However, Japan, Canada, the United States and Russia successfully undermined any binding agreement on how to reach those targets by lobbying to abandon the Kyoto Protocol and replacing it with a weak pledge and review system as proposed in the Copenhagen Accord, according to Friends of the Earth International (FOEI). Current pledges under the accord translate into global temperature rises of three to five degrees C by most analyses.

“The agreement reached here is wholly inadequate and could lead to catastrophic climate change,” said Nnimmo Bassey, FOEI chair. Bassey is this year’s winner of the Right Livelihood Award - the ‘alternative Nobel Prize’ - for “revealing the full ecological and human horrors of oil production” in Nigeria, his home country.

Bassey said developed countries need to reduce their emissions by 40 percent under a new Kyoto Protocol commitment period with legally binding commitments.

The current Kyoto commitment to reduce emissions by five percent from 1990 levels ends in 2012. Most developed countries are meeting that target, with the notable exception of Canada, whose emissions have soared 30 percent.

Canada, Japan and Russia have declared they will not agree to a second Kyoto commitment. The U.S. refused to ratify the first Kyoto commitment and rejects the second as well. Those positions nearly derailed the talks since developing countries have long insisted rich countries agree to binding reductions under Kyoto. Agreeing to disagree, the final fight for Kyoto has been punted to Durban.

A Global Climate Fund was also agreed to with a $100-billion commitment by 2020, with a re-commitment of $35 billion by 2012 to help developing countries reduce their emissions and adapt to impacts of climate change. The fund will be managed by a board with equal representation from developed and developing countries with funding channeled through the World Bank for the first three years.

Tropical forest protection may be the big breakthrough coming out of Cancún. Delegates adopted a decision that establishes a three-phase process for tropical countries to reduce deforestation and receive compensation from developed countries, and it includes protections for forest peoples and biodiversity. Deforestation presently contributes 15 to 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

“This is so much better than what we had in Copenhagen,” said Peg Putt of the Wilderness Society, a U.S.-based conservation group.

“There was official recognition of the multiple benefits of forests and ecosystem integrity,” Putt told TerraViva.

Loopholes have been closed and good progress made on tackling the drivers of deforestation, she said. Much work is left to do to strengthen safeguards and work out the details for a new financial tool called REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation).

REDD remains very controversial. It is widely touted as a way to mobilise $10 to $30 billion annually to protect forests by selling carbon credits to industries in lieu of reductions in emissions.

“I’m feeling very good about the prospects for forests,” Putt said in an interview.

Many Indigenous and civil society groups reject REDD outright if it allows developed countries to avoid real emission reductions by offsetting their emissions.

“We reject false solutions like the carbon market mechanisms of REDD,” said Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network.

REDD represents a new set of tradable property rights based on trees and other environmental services, Goldtooth said in an interview.

“If we are going to save the climate, we need to focus on real solutions that assure that forests will be left standing and people’s rights are respected,” he said.

Although Bolivia’s stance will be much commented on, the more than 500 organisations in the Climate Action Network (CAN) once again voted Canada’s radical right-wing government as the most obstructive nation in the world. For its four years in power, Canada’s Stephen Harper government has won the “Colossal Fossil for the year” during climate negotiations for consistent efforts on behalf of its huge tar sands oil sector to block an agreement.

“Canada’s tar sands sector is truly among the global elite, an all- star of greenhouse gas pollution,” a CAN spokesperson said in a statement. “Despite an overall record of climate futility, Canadians should rest assured there’s at least one thing here that Canada is really, really good at.”

IRIN spoke to four leading climate change negotiating officials from developing countries about their Cancun Christmas wish list: Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu from the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Africa group’s chief negotiator; Hasan Mahmud, the Bangladesh Minister for Environment and Forests; Dessima Williams, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS); and Mama Konate, the main negotiator from Mali.

In the corridors of Moon Palace, the venue where the talks are being held, thousands of delegates walk purposefully from one gathering to another. But the negotiations have been moving at a slower pace, with “extreme options” on many issues – “we need to come to a compromise” position to move forward, said Mpanu-Mpanu.

He would like to see a compromise that could deliver a new climate fund to help developing countries adapt to the impact of extreme natural climatic events, provide technology and build capacity to cope, and grow with fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has identified Africa as one of the regions most vulnerable to the impact of climate change, not only because of the climate variability it faces but also for its “low adaptive capacity” - the continent is home to most of the world’s Least Developed Countries.

“A Christmas wish out of … the [climate change] talks involves a very emotional issue for us … But we have to put our emotions aside and negotiate,” Mpanu-Mpanu told IRIN.

African countries cannot afford to send large delegations, so they have pooled their technical skills and resources and divided the negotiating tracks – adaptation, mitigation, finance, capacity building and technology transfer – among themselves.

“The division of labour has worked very well for us. Despite our limited resources we have worked very efficiently - we are 53 countries and now speaking with one voice,” Mpanu-Mpanu said.

He expects the Africa group to deliver everyone’s Christmas wish. “We are working on a [negotiating] text which will try to bring everyone together, as I think every other group [at the talks] is as well,” he said.

“We have two tools on our side - international law, in the form of the Kyoto Protocol [of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change] and science – we plan to use these,” Mpanu-Mpanu said.

Hasan Mahmud, a former academic, now Bangladesh’s Minister for Environment and Forests, is less optimistic. “If we don’t come up with some progress here in Cancun, after the failure of Copenhagen, people will dismiss this as another UN picnic.”

Mahmud, along with his counterpart from Australia, has been asked to work with the negotiators to resolve issues around finance, capacity building and technology transfer. He, too, would like to achieve consensus.

The debate on the Finance Track of the negotiations has jammed over the establishment of a new climate change fund. “All countries agree we need a fund, but there are countries who are opposed to the establishment of one in Cancun, while developing countries would like to see something concrete come out of here.”

Progress in the talks on capacity building and technology transfer was also tied to the availability of funds, but one of the sticking points in the transfer of technology – for instance, to produce renewable energy – was intellectual property rights, Mahmud said.

“Many developed countries call for strong patent laws in developing nations to ease technology transfer,” wrote Achala Chandani and Linda Siegele, researchers at the UK-based International Institute for Environment and Development in a brief on the Cancun meeting.

“[However,] some developing countries say that strictly enforced patent rights can lead to high licence costs and obstruct the use and adaptation of technologies for local conditions.”

Mahmud said many countries were suggesting that the debate on intellectual property rights be deferred.

The fiery Dessima Williams, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) would love to see an international mechanism set up to provide financial compensation for the loss and damage caused by a rising sea level, more intense and frequent cyclones, and other slow-onset impacts of climate change.

AOSIS proposed the mechanism in 2008. “We must see this happen here [Cancun], otherwise we will not be able to survive,” she said.

The cost of extreme natural events “can cripple poor nations — in 2008 cyclone Nargis killed more than 138,000 people in Myanmar and caused an estimated US$4 billion in damages [about 30 percent of the country’s gross domestic product],” wrote Chandani and Siegele.

“Developed countries are uncomfortable with terms like ‘compensation’ when describing the ‘Loss and Damage’ mechanism, because it indicates a legal obligation to take an action,” the international NGO, World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) noted in a statement in Cancun.

WWF said the mechanism should also cover climate change induced displacement, migration and relocation of vulnerable populations.

Many negotiators agreed with Mama Konate, the lead negotiator from Mali, that the twin-track process – of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and providing support to developing countries for mitigation and adaptation – should continue.

“We cannot support calls from some countries to do away with the twin-track process,” said Konate, who also chairs the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice of the UNFCCC.

There is a split between some developed and all developing countries over whether support for adaptation should also be accounted for as emissions are. Developing countries want financial support to be measurable.

Konate said the process to set up a new climate fund should happen in Cancun, and not be left until a later date.

“There is goodwill,” he said optimistically. ”There is much less aggression than compared to Copenhagen.”

Source: The World Bank Group

See Report here

According to initial estimates from Swiss Re’s sigma team, worldwide economic losses from natural catastrophes and man-made disasters were USD 222 billion in 2010, more than triple the 2009 figure of USD 63 billion. The cost to the global insurance industry was USD 36 billion, an increase of 34% over the previous year. Approximately 260 000 people died in these events, the highest number since 1976.

In 2010, severe catastrophes claimed significantly more lives than the previous year: nearly 260 000 were killed, compared to 15 000 in 2009. The deadliest event in 2010 was the Haiti earthquake in January, claiming more than 222 000 lives. Approximately 15 000 people died during the summer heat wave in Russia. The summer floods in China and Pakistan also resulted in 6 225 deaths.

High earthquake losses in 2010

Natural catastrophes cost the global insurance industry roughly USD 31 billion in 2010, and man-made disasters triggered additional claims of approximately USD 5 billion. By way of comparison, overall insured losses totalled USD 27 billion in 2009. Despite notably higher than average earthquake losses, overall claims in 2010 were in line with the 20-year average due to unusually modest US hurricane losses. However, the estimate of USD 36 billion is still subject to uncertainty due to, amongst other things, the ongoing European winter storm season.

Eight events triggered losses of over USD 1 billion each

In the first eleven months of 2010, eight events each triggered insurance losses in excess of USD 1 billion. The costliest event in 2010 was the earthquake in Chile in February, which cost the insurance industry USD 8 billion, according to preliminary estimates.  The earthquake that struck New Zealand in September cost insurers roughly USD 2.7 billion. Winter storm Xynthia in Western Europe led to insured losses of USD 2.8 billion. Property claims from the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico are estimated at USD 1 billion. Given the complexity of the claims, the figure is still subject to substantial uncertainty. The overall insurance loss is higher, as liability losses are not included in the sigma numbers. Floods in France during the month of June caused insured losses just below USD 1 billion.

Natural catastrophes and man-made disasters cost society USD 222 billion in 2010

These devastating events caused economic losses to soar to an estimated USD 222 billion, compared to USD 63 billion in 2009.

Thomas Hess, Chief Economist of Swiss Re, commented: ”The humanitarian catastrophes again showed how important prevention and post disaster management are for protecting the lives and health of people affected by natural hazards. They also revealed large differences in how developed insurance systems are in the affected countries and how important insurance is in coping with the financial consequences of disasters. While most of the costliest events caused by the earthquakes in Chile and New Zealand and the winter storm in Western Europe were covered by insurance, events like the earthquake in Haiti and floods in Asia were barely insured.”

See Full report

The UN-HABITAT, the Building and Social Housing Foundation (BSHF) and the UNDP Special Unit for South-South Cooperation announced the winners of the Housing and Urban Development South-South Transfer Award, a special joint initiative which seeks to recognise housing and urban development practices that have been successfully transferred to other countries in the global South.
The awards have being presented on 25th November 2010 as part of the activities of the Global South-South Development Expo in Geneva, Switzerland, a platform for showcasing successful Southern-grown development solutions to address the Millenium Development Goals. The aim of the award is to identify, provide visibility, and honour those who have sucessfuly shared their projects and approaches internationally, thereby increasing the impact of the initiative.
The winner of the Housing and Urban Development South-South Transfer Award is Un Techo Para mi País (A Roof for my Country), Chile, awarded for mobilising thousands of youth volunteers and transferring its innovative approach to 19 countries across Latin America.

A special mention is also being awarded to Development Workshop’s Preventing Typhoon Damage to Housing programme in Vietnam:
The Preventing Typhoon Damage to Housing programme has worked over many years with families and local governments in Vietnam to apply key principles of safe storm and flood resistant construction, both to existing structures and in new housing construction. The principles of disaster risk reduction are now being progressively adopted by other households, NGOs and government agencies both in Vietnam and in other countries, with the approach transferred to Indonesia, Myanmar and Haiti. The transfer has taken place at different levels, from policy to direct community engagement. In each case, strong communication and awareness-raising techniques have been a key part of the process and the principles for disaster-resistant construction and disaster risk reduction have been effectively adapted to each particular context.
Geneva, 25th November 2010

But despite the ever more compelling science regarding the urgency and risks of climate change and growing public support for action, representatives from nearly 200 countries meeting here in Cancún for the next two weeks are unlikely to produce a new binding agreement.

At best, matters such as forestry, climate finance and mitigation commitments will be further developed in the faint hope that the next big meeting in South Africa might produce some kind of deal.

“Carbon emissions continue to climb despite the economic recession and yet I have never seen such low expectations for a COP (Conference of the Parties),” said Richard Somerville, an eminent climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.

“The science is quite compelling regarding the need for urgent action. We don’t have another five years to reach an agreement,” Somerville told TerraViva.

In 2009, Somerville and others co-authored an update on the latest climate science called ‘The Copenhagen Diagnosis’ which concluded that global carbon emissions had to peak and begin to decline before 2020 to have any hope of keeping global warming to less than 2.0 degrees C.

However, the negotiators in Cancún will mostly not be acting on the science but on their national interests as directed by their political leadership, who largely do not understand climate change, he said.

“Developed countries think they can adapt to warmer temperatures. I don’t see how we can keep warming below 2.0 degrees C.,” Somerville said.

Cancún is the 16th meeting of the Conference of Parties of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, an international body formed after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit to deal with the pressing global problem of climate change.

At that time, virtually all countries agreed that emissions of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, had to decline. In Kyoto, Japan, industrialised countries promised to reduce their emissions by five percent from the 1990 base year.

However, global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in 2008 were 40 percent higher than those in 1990 primarily because northern countries like the United States failed to make reductions while emissions by some developing countries like China increased dramatically.

At the last COP in Copenhagen, industrialised countries agreed to keep the rise in global temperatures below 2.0 C. However, even if countries live up to their vague emission reduction pledges in the Copenhagen Accord, humanity is headed for 2.6-5C of warming by 2100 by most analyses.

This range is what most scientists call dangerous or catastrophic climate change, including the loss of coral reefs and other important ecosystems. Moreover, the northern latitudes will heat up much more than the global average - perhaps seven to 14 degrees C in the polar regions - almost certainly guaranteeing the release of vast quantities of methane from the Arctic permafrost.

“Potential methane release from northern permafrost and wetlands under future climate change is of great concern,” warned the World Meteorological Organisation in a bulletin last week. Methane is a greenhouse gas with 25 times more warming potential than carbon dioxide, and now has atmospheric levels 158 percent higher than pre-industrial times.

The Copenhagen Accord has so many loopholes countries can claim they’ve kept their promises while increasing their emissions, said Sivan Kartha, a climate scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, an independent international policy research institute.

“It should be exposed for the embarrassment that it is, the loopholes closed off and national reduction commitments increased,” Kartha told IPS.

The strong sense of common purpose at the Rio Earth Summit to meet the dangers of climate change has been lost and negotiations reduced to what seems to be just another trade negotiation, he said.

“In Copenhagen the open, transparent and democratic process that had been key to earlier negotiations vanished. It may be the same in Cancún where small groups of countries do deals behind closed doors,” he said.

Such deals nearly always tilt negotiations to just one perspective. What works for China and the U.S., for example, may be very bad for those countries most impacted by climate change, Kartha says. “The urgency we face should not justify a bad deal for some.”

The exclusion of the interests of small countries and civil society in Copenhagen prompted 35,000 members of the public and global civil society to meet in Bolivia for a parallel ‘people’s summit’ last April. They signed the Cochabamba People’s Accord calling for recognition of a ‘Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth’ and the creation of an International Climate and Environmental Justice Tribunal.

However, those proposals from Cochabamba have been excluded from the formal negotiations here in Cancún, according to La Via Campesina, an international peasant movement with millions of members.

“During the last moments of discussion, the proposals of the People’s Agreement signed in Cochabamba have been left aside,” said Alberto Gomez from La Via Campesina international coordination.

The organisation is mobilising thousands of supporters to march on Cancún to pressure governments to adopt the measures in the Cochabamba People’s Accord. A mass demonstration will be held Dec. 7 in Cancún and many other locations around the world. In Cancún, an estimated 6,000 heavily armed Mexican military and police are already on hand to meet them.

“We do not agree with false solutions such as the carbon market because, far from reducing greenhouse gases, it will sooner or later create a speculative system leading the world into another global financial crisis,” Gomez said in a statement.

“La Via Campesina mobilises to denounce the irresponsibility of most of the governments who choose to support capital rather than the interest of their nation and of humanity as a whole,” he said.

“Communities have been living with disasters for much longer than we have been talking about disaster risk reduction,” said Dilruba Haider, a director of NGO Bangladesh Disaster Preparedness Centre (BDPC). [ http://www.bdpc.org.bd/ ]

“Unless you involve communities and give them the feeling that this is their project, as soon as you withdraw, the whole thing collapses.”

A good example of community involvement was when the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation contracted out the construction of four cyclone shelters in Bagerhat District in the far southwest of the country - and BDPC engaged communities to select the sites and oversee the work.

These shelters contrast with much of the prior work nationwide, Haider said.

“In the coastal belt we have more than 2,000 cyclone shelters, many of which have already become shabby and unusable. Government and donors built them and then they go out of the area and the community just sees a building,” she said.

Changing weather patterns, widespread poverty and a location in the world’s largest delta puts the country at risk of multiple perennial disasters.

The southern coastal areas are particularly vulnerable to the effects of increasingly volatile weather, said Reuben Marandy, World Vision’s manager of humanitarian and emergency affairs.

“Usually from June to August we have monsoon season, but the rainfall has decreased significantly, and so rice crops are not being planted; the season is running out and a food shortage may happen,” he said.

Getting villages prepared to move their families and preserve food means they have a better chance of being able to adapt when disasters strike, he added.

But this is not always easy.

With about 35 percent of the population in Bangladesh’s six largest cities living in slums, according to UN Development Programme, interesting the country’s poorest in disaster preparedness means addressing their most basic needs.

“Normal health, livelihoods, education - those are their priorities. In rural communities, it’s the same. Most of them prioritize their livelihoods,” said Michiel Slotema, NGO Plan International’s disaster risk reduction adviser.

Raised village

For Munjela Bewa, a 28-year-old widow and mother of two, finding a place to live that would not flood was a priority. Gono Gobeshona, a local NGO, [ http://www.gonogobeshona.org/ ] involved her community to create a solution.

“The organization first shared what they wanted to do and then asked us what our problems were,” Bewa said.

She now lives in Char Kaijuri, a raised village in the northwestern district of Sirajganj.

Located on the River Jamuna, Sirajganj is one of the country’s most flood-prone areas. With that in mind, Gono Gobeshona, with support from Action Aid, worked with local people to create a “raised cluster village” built on land above the area that usually floods.

Most residents moved to Char Kaijuri to settle on government-owned land after their homes were destroyed in surrounding villages due to river erosion.

Almost 200 nations will meet in Cancun, Mexico, from Nov. 29 to Dec. 10 for annual talks, hoping to agree a package of measures including a green fund to help manage aid to poor nations.

Findings by the U.N.‘s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its latest report from 2007:

* OBSERVED CHANGES - “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal”.

* CAUSES OF CHANGE - “Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in ... greenhouse gas concentrations” from human activities. (“Very likely” means at least 90 percent)

Annual greenhouse gas emissions from human activities have risen by 70 percent since 1970. Concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, far exceed the natural range over the last 650,000 years.

* PROJECTED CLIMATE CHANGES - Temperatures are likely to rise by between 1.1 and 6.4 degrees Celsius (2.0 and 11.5 Fahrenheit) and sea levels by between 18 cm and 59 cm (7 inches and 23 inches) this century, without accounting for risks of an accelerated thaw of Greenland and Antarctica.

Africa, the Arctic, small islands and Asian mega-deltas are likely to be especially affected by climate change. Sea level rise “would continue for centuries” because of the momentum of warming even if greenhouse gas levels are stabilised.

“Warming could lead to some impacts that are abrupt or irreversible”. About 20-30 percent of species will be at increasing risk of extinction if future temperature rises exceed 1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius.

* SOLUTIONS/COSTS - Governments have a wide range of tools—higher taxes on emissions, regulations, tradeable permits and research. An effective carbon price could help cuts.

Emissions of greenhouse gases would have to peak by 2015 to limit global temperature rises to 2.0 to 2.4 degrees Celsius (3.6-4.3F) over pre-industrial times, the strictest goal assessed.

The costs of fighting warming will range from less than 0.12 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) per year for the most stringent scenarios until 2030 to less than 0.06 percent for a less tough goal. In the most costly case, that means a cumulative loss of GDP by 2030 of less than 3 percent.

ERRORS

In July 2010, a review by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency said the IPCC:

—exaggerated the rate of melt of Himalayan glaciers by saying they could all vanish by 2035.

—wrongly said that 55 percent of the Netherlands is below sea level. The real figure is 26 percent.

—wrongly projected that between 75 million and 250 million people in Africa are at risk of stress on water supplies by 2020 due to climate change. The original study on which the forecast was based had estimated 90 to 220 million people.

The Agency concluded that it “found no errors that would undermine the main conclusions in the 2007 report”.

BRUSSELS, Nov 15 (Reuters) - European governments have fulfilled a promise to deliver 2.2 billion euros ($3 billion) to help poor countries tackle climate change, EU reports show, but critics say the money might have come from rebranding existing aid pledges.

At last year’s Copenhagen climate summit, rich countries pledged $30 billion of “fast start finance” to help poorer countries adapt to climate change and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions during 2010-2012.

The move was largely designed to prove to poor countries that promises of climate aid were more than just rhetoric, so proof of delivery is seen as key for progress in the next round of climate talks in Cancun, Mexico, starting on Nov. 29.

“The EU member states and the European Commission have confirmed 2.2 billion euros of fast-start finance in 2010, thereby remaining on track to meet its overall commitment of 7.2 billion across the 2010-12 fast start period,” says a draft EU report seen by Reuters.

See report detailing the individual projects:

The projects include some that seek to help poor countries adapt to changing weather patterns, such as a German grant of 300,000 euros to help Mozambique build a flood warning system.

The Czech Republic also granted 400,000 euros to Ethiopia for projects to revitalise wells, increase water supplies and halt the erosion of soils.

Other projects focus on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, such as a 900,000 euro grant from Germany to Brazil to help recycle refrigerators in a way that does not release powerful planet-warming gases.

Others are more abstract, such as a 50,000 euro grant from Britain “to increase African voice and influence, through high-profile African figures, for a new international climate change deal”.

Some development groups suspect, however, that EU countries might simply be recycling existing aid pledges already made under the U.N.‘s Millennium Development Goals.

“Europe has a chance to rebuild trust with poor countries at Cancun, but the draft EU report on short-term climate finance suggests they are attempting a cover-up,” said Elise Ford, head of Oxfam’s EU policy office in Brussels.

“Poor countries deserve to know whether EU cash for climate action is really new and fresh or whether it is just being repackaged from past aid promises,” she added.

Four of the EU’s 27 member countries have not delivered on their promises, the EU draft report says, without naming them.

But that would not be surprising, given that Europe is wrestling with its worst economic crisis in 80 years, and many countries have to make deep budget cuts at home