The worst flooding the Philippines has seen
in decades highlights the urgent need for US leadership to push UN climate change negotiations in Bangkok forward to help ensure the best chance of securing a global climate treaty in Copenhagen,
international aid agency Oxfam said today.In the Philippines, with many dead and 330,000 displaced by flooding in Manila, climate-related factors are blamed for an increased burden on the
health budget, which is struggling to keep up with increased cases of nutritional deficiencies and diseases such as dengue, malaria and cholera.Oxfam research shows that the number of people
affected by climate crises is projected to rise to 54 per cent to 375 million over the next six years, threatening the world’s ability to respond.Oxfam International Senior Climate
Policy Adviser Antonio Hill said the content of the new US Climate Change and Energy Bill due to be introduced in the Senate this week, and moves from US officials in Bangkok from today, would provide
a stronger picture of whether the US was willing to step up and provide the momentum desperately needed in the negotiations.Mr Hill said recent announcements by British Prime Minister Gordon
Brown and the EU on climate financing, and Japan and China’s stronger language last week on emissions reductions and finance, would put extra pressure on the US to step up and signal its
intentions on its role in a global deal. ”Despite good intentions and warm words over the past six months, the US didn’t deliver real leadership last week at the UN
Climate Summit and G20. Either the US lifts its game, or the next two weeks in Bangkok could go down as just a holding pattern before a fatal nosedive in Copenhagen,” he said.He said while many key countries, including China, India, Japan, African Union, the Least Developed Countries and the Alliance of Small Island States, had shown they were ready to enter the final,
more detailed phase of negotiations, intransigence on the part of rich countries like the US, Canada and Australia was proving an obstacle to progress.Key sticking points remain the emissions
reductions developed countries are willing to deliver - current commitments are around 15 per cent instead of the science-based 40 per cent reductions on 1990 levels by 2020 - and the amount of
financing they will put on the table for developing countries to both adapt to the impacts of climate change and develop on a low carbon pathway.  The two-week
negotiations, held in South-East Asia, one of the world’s most vulnerable regions to climate change, is the penultimate negotiation session before Copenhagen in December, when a fair and safe
global climate change treaty must be secured. Mr Hill said that whilst last week’s summits in the US were forums for world leaders to signal their intentions, the UN
negotiating process continuing in Bangkok was the only place where countries could forge an agreement to avoid catastrophic climate change. ”It’s crunch time,” Mr
Hill said. “What is needed for a breakthrough is a clear commitment from developed countries - responsible for three-quarters of the carbon in the atmosphere - to commit to
substantial finance, additional to existing aid levels, to developing countries.”Climate change is already affecting South-East Asia:Â extreme weather events such as heat
waves, droughts, floods and tropical cyclones have increased in frequency and intensity in recent decades, exacerbating water shortages, hampering agricultural production and threatening food
security, causing forest fires and coastal degradation, and increasing health risks.Mr Hill said a study in Thailand found that aquaculture farmers in Bang Khu Thian were spending an average
of US$3,130 per household every year to protect their farms from coastal erosion and flooding between 1993 and 2007 - a quarter of annual household incomes. ”Once developing
countries have confidence about the scale of resources rich countries are prepared to negotiate, then they can turn their attention to how they might achieve emissions reductions in their own
countries, and work can begin on how a global climate fund could operate. These detailed negotiations must not be left till the eleventh hour in Copenhagen,” he said.Mr Hill
said it was crucial that this finance be over and above existing aid commitments otherwise decades of development gains would be reversed and millions more people would be plunged deeper into
poverty.He said the Copenhagen framework also needed to help enable smallholder farmers make agriculture resilient to climate impacts and achieve emissions reductions from the sector.//Ends More from the Oxfam Press Office at http://www.oxfam.org.uk/news
[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]
Relatives react after confirming the identity of a loved one killed from floods brought on by the continuous rains of Typhoon Ketsana, locally known as Ondoy, inside a morgue in the ...
