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World Bank condemns 'business as usual' approach to climate change
Four months after the Doha climate summit, and the World Bank says it's worrying to see little global effort being made in tackling climate change. It says the 'business as usual' approach is undermining any effort the bank has made in addressing global poverty. The vice president for Sustainable Development says the poor are already being hit hard and inaction on climate change is making it worse.
TANYA NOLAN: Four months after the Doha climate summit, and the World Bank says it's worrying to see little global effort being made in tackling climate change.
It says the "business as usual" approach is undermining any effort the bank has made in addressing global poverty.
The vice president for Sustainable Development says the poor are already being hit hard and inaction on climate change is making it worse.
Rachel Kyte is talking to environment reporter Sarah Clarke.
RACHEL KYTE: We fear that if we continue as business as usual living in a four degree world by the end of the century is going to mean that some of the progress that has been made in eradicating poverty over the last 20 years where 660 million people have been lifted out of poverty, that some of that progress is going to be rolled back.
So for an organisation that is focussed on ending poverty, is focused on building prosperity, climate change is the rug underneath us which somebody is going to pull out.
SARAH CLARKE: And what are some of the examples that you're seeing now with some communities living with climate change and the problems it's causing?
RACHEL KYTE: So we see poor communities living in urban informal settlements being buffeted by increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events so you see more and more floods hitting certain cities and with enormous devastating human and economic cost.
For example, in the floods in Thailand recently the economic losses from that flood were totalled at $US46 billion - that's 3 per cent of Thailand's GDP growth.
We also see in the rural areas of the world in the farming communities of the world increased droughts, so droughts that would happen every 10 years in the Horn of Africa are now happening every two and the same in the Sahel and you're seeing the resilience of the poor really being tested by climate volatility today.
This is no longer a problem of climate happening to somebody else over there in the future. It is happening to people all around the world today and the poor are suffering most.
SARAH CLARKE: At what point is it too late to do anything about global warming?
RACHEL KYTE: The science has now predicting and we've put our arms around the science that we are on track for a four degree world unless we take aggressive action now but we don't think its unstoppable. The solutions are not rocket science.
The solutions are the reengineering of the kind of economic growth that we're experiencing or that we've been used to and that means that we have to put a price on carbon, it means we have to take out inefficient subsidies for fossil fuels, for farm subsidies and fishery subsidies which are neither helping the efficient management of natural resources nor helping the poor nor building equal societies.
These have to be taken out of the system. We need to build, design and live in our cities differently. This is doable as well and we need to farm differently. Farming of the future has to be farming which will allow agricultural products to continue to grow, it has to be a farming that employs people and provides livelihoods but the farming methods that we use can also suck carbon out of the atmosphere and put it back into the soil.
TANYA NOLAN: Rachel Kyte is the vice president for sustainable development with the World Bank and she was speaking there to environment reporter Sarah Clarke.
Author Sarah Clarke