| Global Warming: A Hot Topic |
By BBC Caribbean
August 29, 2007
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More than 100 nations meeting in Vienna have been struggling to strike a balance between what rich and poor countries must do to cut greenhouse gas emissions and slow global warming.
Leon Charles of Grenada, who is helping oversee the talks said a key goal is |
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| forging a rough consensus on emissions targets that industrialised countries can formally agree to at a summit in Bali later this year. |
| Meanwhile, a report by the United Nations body dealing with climate change says that spending more money on energy efficiency is the easiest way of slowing global warming. |
| The UN report, presented to a climate conference in Vienna, suggests that the world will need to spend an extra two hundred billion dollars a year by 2030 to keep emissions of greenhouse gases at their current levels. |
| And this money needs to be spent principally in the developing world. |
| When the world's environment ministers meet later this year in Indonesia to start the process of negotiating a new global agreement on cutting emissions, this document on the financial cost of combating climate change will be crucial to their discussions. |
| The cost of climate change |
| The report looks at the next twenty five years and analyses the cost of both curbing emissions and helping countries adapt to the impacts of rising temperatures. It concludes that additional investments of two hundred and ten billion dollars a year will have to be found to keep greenhouse gas emissions at their current levels. |
| It says that the most promising way of reducing emissions is by better use of existing energy - This means more insulation in buildings, higher fuel efficiencies in cars and a shift to solar, hydro electric and nuclear power. |
| Preety Bhandari is co-ordinator of the financial and technical support programme at the UN's climate change secretariat. |
| She says that climate change may turn out to be an environmental question with an economic answer. |
| The developing world will require a large share of this investment because of rapid economic growth. |
| The report says that one key way of getting money flowing to poorer countries is through carbon markets where rich countries can pay for emissions cutting projects in developing nations. |
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