27 February 2007International Herald Tribune
The poor must adapt to climate change using local knowledge, according to experts from around the world gathered at a conference in Bangladesh.
The experts exchanged information on how local people are coping with heat waves in the mountains of India, floods in Bangladesh and Nepal, droughts in Kenya, and soil poisoned by salt in Sri Lanka.
Poor people are already being hurt by the earth's rising temperatures, the experts said, maintaining that adapting to climate change deserves just as much focus as reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
"Global warming is a reality now," Ian Burton, a Toronto-based expert in climate change, told The Associated Press in an interview on the sidelines of the climate change conference in Dhaka. The conference started Saturday and ends Wednesday in Dhaka.
"Rich countries are responsible but poorer nations are bearing the brunt," he said, adding that adaptation at the community level is the answer to the problem.
The London-based International Institute for Environment and Development and the Dhaka-based Bangladesh Center for Advanced Studies organized the conference to share experiences on local climate adaptation programs across the world.
The conference was being held more than three weeks after the United Nations-backed International Panel on Climate Change, a scientific body charged with assessing the evidence for and risk of global warming, declared it "very likely" that the globe's increasing temperature is a result of human activity.
Many poor countries where a large number of people live on less than US$1 a day are most vulnerable to the impact of global warming.
Bangladesh, with a population of 144 million, is a good example how global warming impacts the very poor.
The country is a vast delta that is barely above the sea level, making it prone to flooding from waterways swollen by rain and melting snow from the Himalayas.
Bangladeshi climate change expert Atiq Rahman said if the sea rises by 30 centimeters (a foot), which some researchers say could happen over next few decades, up to 12 percent of the population living across the vast coast would be flooded out of their homes.
"Our poor people will suffer more, their future poverty will be much more severe," Rahman said.
Melting glaciers on the Himalayas are already causing floods along rivers in Bangladesh, he said.
The melting glacier water carries mud and sand, which is spread during the flooding, filling in some river beds and leading to drought in the north, he said.
Rising sea levels are one factor causing salty sea water to encroach on fresh water in the southwest, he said.
Saleemul Huq, head of the climate change group at the International Institute for Environment and Development, told the AP that international policy-makers need to focus as much on adaptation to climate change as on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
"Vulnerable communities can't sit idle," Huq said.
He said poorer nations lack money, resources and technology to stand against the dangerous impacts of climate change.
"It's important to rethink the whole thing and focus on adaptation," he said.
