NAIROBI, Kenya — UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on Wednesday put the blame for global warming on a "frightening lack of leadership," saying the poorest people in the world, who create little pollution, bear the brunt of rising temperatures.
"The impact of climate change will fall disproportionately on the world's poorest countries, many of them here in Africa," Annan told a major climate conference. "Poor people already live on the front lines of pollution, disaster and the degradation of resources and land.
"For them," the UN leader said, "adaptation is a matter of sheer survival."
At a news conference afterward, when pressed about his comments on poor leadership, Annan denied that he was singling out the United States, the world's biggest source of the smokestack and tailpipe gases that are linked by most scientists to rising temperatures. The United States is also one of the few countries that has not ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the first treaty setting limits on the heat-trapping pollutants.
"My speech was not directed at a particular individual or leader," Annan said. "I just want leaders around the world to show courage, because this is one of the greatest challenges of our time."
Among other issues, negotiators at the climate conference are exploring how to set new emissions limits for the period after 2012, when Kyoto's terms expire. Bush administration officials have said the U.S. has no plans to accept binding limits.
U.S.: We're not the problem
The U.S. delegation denied that it was part of the leadership failure Annan mentioned.
Paula Dobriansky, the undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs, said Wednesday that "we think the United States has been leading in its groundbreaking initiatives." She listed several measures, including financial incentives for businesses to reduce pollution and strict domestic rules, that she said had helped fight global warming.
Each year thousands of environmental experts, government officials and activist groups gather for a nearly two-week conference on how to battle global warming.
This year's conference in Nairobi, partly because it has drawn so many Africans, has focused on the possibility that those least responsible for pollution-induced climate change may suffer the most. Africa, one of the least industrialized areas in the world, is a case in point.
The herders of Kenya's grassy plains, for example, whose total pollution basically boils down to their cooking fires and the few cigarettes they smoke, are being displaced by increasingly frequent droughts, which many scientists attribute at least partly to global warming.
Malaria, one of Africa's leading killers, is reaching higher altitudes because of rising temperatures. The Sahara is expanding, turning farmland into desert and contributing to conflicts like the one in Sudan's Darfur region. The list goes on.
"Africa faces some of the fiercest effects of climate change," Kenya's president, Mwai Kibaki, said Wednesday at the conference. He said warmer temperatures could destroy agriculture and tourism, two of Kenya's brightest hopes for a way out of poverty.
Focus on adaptation
The emphasis on poor countries has led to another running theme at this year's climate caucus: adaptation. Experts and politicians concede that so much carbon dioxide, one of the dominant heat-trapping gases, has already accumulated in the atmosphere that the world must accept global warming and determine how to adapt to it.
"For too long the international community focused almost exclusively on mitigation," said Kivutha Kibwana, Kenya's environmental minister and president of the conference. "Let Nairobi be the starting point whereby adaptation and mitigation efforts go hand in hand."
The conference established the broad outlines of an adaptation fund that calls for industrialized countries to help poor ones deal with the adverse effects of climate change through steps such as relocating coastal people displaced by floods.
The fund is still tiny, about $3 million, but United Nations officials say it will grow rapidly and there is a plan to manage it. Each country will get one vote, which will give the developing world a larger voice than that of industrialized nations.
But much work remains, and the conference ends Friday. One bogged-down proposal is the effort to limit the average global temperature increase to 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit, which would significantly change the environment. In the past century, average global temperatures have risen about 1 degree.