UN: Addressing climate change must include development

Addressing rising temperatures will require investing in low-emission, high-growth strategies for developing countries, according to a report by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs released Tuesday.

"It is now clear that global warming is a development issue as well as environmental issue," Noeleen Heyzer, the UN's Under-Secretary-General and United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) executive secretary, said on the release of The World Economic and Social Survey 2009: Promoting Development, Saving the Planet.

"Never has there been a greater cause for global solidarity," Heyzer said at a press conference in Bangkok.

The report spells out the need for a "big push" to address both reducing greenhouse gases and helping communities cope with the effects of climate change.

The two cannot be separated and government involvement is critical because market forces alone will not result in the needed change, Tiziana Bonapace, of ESCAP, said.

Bonapace said climate change was a market failure and "selective government intervention with market mechanisms is the key" to making the needed changes.

She noted how governments recently intervened to save banks and other businesses as an example of what is needed.

Specifically there needs to be a new Marshall Plan with an additional 1 per cent of World Gross Product of between 500-600 billion dollars each year from the rich to the poor countries keying in on renewable energies and efficiencies and forest management.

The report says the measures needed are enormous and will need active participation from all countries. But they will only work if developing countries maintain rapid economic growth.

The report accepts the common wisdom today that climate change is a reality that must be addressed, but states "the idea of freezing the current level of global inequality over the next half century or more (as the world goes about trying to solve the climate problem) is economically, politically and ethically unacceptable."

   Bonapace added there is a gross injustice that the developing countries - which have contributed the least green house gases - would be the ones that suffer the most.

"Developing countries have a right to economic growth," she said.

Bonapace said the longer the world waits to make the needed changes - away from greenhouse gases-producing industries to a "green growth approach" - the more difficult and costly the measures required will be.

Heyzer echoed her sentiment that change is needed: "I think that we don't have a choice, for this generation and the next."

"Climate change is the biggest challenge faced by our generation. For many of our Pacific Islands states it threatens their very survival."

The report comes three months before negotiations for a new global agreement to address climate change enter their final stages at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference and is meant to weigh in on those meetings in December.