The Poor Island Nations Need Help Much More Than The Industrialized West

Climate disaster movies tend to show apocalyptic events happening in rich places, such as London being engulfed by rising seas or Manhattan obliterated by tidal waves.

These plots conveniently ignore that we, in the rich West, have the wealth and engineering capacity to protect our cities by building mammoth flood defences. These structures only depend on money and political will.

Bangladesh and many small islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans have millions of people living only a few centimetres above the high-tide mark but they are too poor to protect themselves. These countries are pinning their hopes on the Copenhagen climate summit to deliver the funding from rich countries, which will allow them to build their own defences. The Maldives is even preparing for permanent evacuation and wants money from the West to help to buy a new homeland.

Yet the summit looks likely to agree only a fraction of what these countries say they need. Rich countries have proposed a global fund of £100 billion a year, at least half of which would come from private companies. Poor countries want at least £240 billion a year and are deeply suspicious of funds that are dependent on the vagaries of a global market in carbon emissions permits.

Lack of agreement over funding is one of the main issues that could cause developing countries to walk out of the Copenhagen talks. The biggest developing countries — China, India, Brazil and South Africa — are expected to present an alternative negotiating text for the summit today that will make for uncomfortable reading in Western capitals.

They will refuse to sign up to a global agreement to cut emissions by half on 1990 levels by 2050. Lord Stern of Brentford says this is the minimum cut needed to have a 50 per cent chance of avoiding an increase in global average temperature of more than 2C. More than that and runaway global warming becomes much more likely, ice sheets melt and sea levels could rise by several metres.

The developing countries will also reject demands from the US for scrutiny of their own efforts to reduce their growth in emissions. They will argue that rich countries must agree to emissions cuts of at least 40 per cent by 2020 before they will even begin to negotiate a global reduction target that includes their economies.

All the while the Alliance of Small Island States is looking on in despair. Its members are calling for the temperature increase to be limited to 1.5C to give them a better than average chance of surviving. Today, at least, it is only their voices, not yet their people, that are being drowned out. The Times