INTERVIEW-World Bank needs $10 bln climate fund-chief scientist
20 Feb 2007 16:51:50 GMT Source: Reuters
By Gerard Wynn LONDON, Feb 20 (Reuters) - The World Bank wants to breathe life back into a mooted $10 billion-plus fund to combat climate change which would need public and private sector backing, its Chief Scientist Robert Watson told Reuters on Tuesday. Tackling climate change is in many ways an energy problem -- and there are big up-front costs to install the energy saving kit and other technologies that would curb emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels. Developing countries especially need to clean up -- or de-carbonise -- their energy, given their emissions are seen overtaking rich nations soon after 2010, and because they are installing huge new capacity to power their breakneck growth. Funding for poor countries now includes the Global Environment Facility (GEF), which has 30-plus donor countries, and carbon trading under the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012, but these are not nearly enough, said Watson. The World Bank's idea is for a fund which will lend money on soft terms to poor nations to help them cut emissions, getting in return interest payments plus carbon credits equivalent to the amount of the emissions reductions, which the fund could then sell on. "It would start to make a difference while governments are negotiating what a new Kyoto Protocol may look like," he said. "If you want to make a big dent in the climate change problem you need to scale up." The fund, called the clean energy financing vehicle, would use public and potentially private capital, be managed by one entity such as the Bank, and fund developing country efforts to de-carbonise. "We're working with India now, asking what their energy demand will be over the next 10 to 20 years," Watson said. The idea would be to pin-point options for lower carbon energy, put together a plan owned by the country and then help fund it. Representatives of the 185 countries which own the World Bank last year said the Bank must use existing money for now until that became limiting. "We already know that's limiting," said Watson. The GEF has some $250 million annually to fund climate change projects in poor countries, Watson estimated, while Kyoto carbon trading funds to help finance clean energy projects reached some $3 billion last year. The cost to install energy efficiency kit and renewable energy technologies would be around $10 billion per year for China alone, Watson estimated. CLIMATE IMPACTS The world's top climate scientists earlier this month reinforced concern about climate change, reporting that mankind was to blame for global warming and calling for urgent action to avert damage. A follow-up report in April will focus on the likely impacts of expected global warming, and recent research shows that existing concern will be reinforced, said Watson -- a past chair of such reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). "The recent literature further strengthens our concerns. There's a bigger body of evidence that we should be concerned about adverse impacts on agriculture, coastal zones, water resources and human health." Watson said that the threat from climate change was such that a barely tested technology to capture greenhouse gases from power plants and bury them underground was looking increasingly vital to act fast enough to avoid serious effects. "Unfortunately I do (wonder) without it how we can ever limit atmospheric carbon dioxide... given the huge cheap coal reserves under the United States and China."
