The World Bank will take part in a ministerial meeting this week – called by the UK Government – to promote a new dialogue on climate change, clean energy and sustainable development. The meeting which will also be attended by ministers from developed and developing countries follows the decision of the G8 summit earlier this year to make climate change a priority. November 01, 2005—Imagine an area inhabited by poor people which is climate proof – a place where all the buildings, road and power plants are built to withstand the forces of nature. Imagine too the poor people living in that area having catastrophic insurance – courtesy of the private sector. It’s an idea now being explored by the World Bank as part of its work on climate change and in seeking opportunities to work with new partners such as the insurance and reinsurance industry. The World Bank’s work on climate change has been given a new impetus following the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, in July, where leaders of the group of eight industrialized nations put climate change on the agenda, not only as a global environment issue but also as a development issue. In the wake of that meeting, the Bank’s vice president for sustainable development Ian Johnson says the Bank has a key role to play as a global issues manager on climate change. “Climate change is both an environmental threat and also a threat to developing countries, because it is the poor people in developing countries who are the most vulnerable to changes in climate variability – the weather changes – that we are beginning to already see,” Johnson says. “And the changes in climate change will have a profound impact on many poor people in many poor countries.” Strategic Thinking Drawing on its experience of 17 years in climate change, Johnson says the G8 summit has provided the stimulus for the Bank to “ do some strategic thinking on the next number of years on what the Bank needs to do and what the world needs to do to put the right kinds of investments at the right time into place for developing countries.” And in line with that, Johnson says while the Bank will continue its work with traditional partners such as governments and financial institutions, it’s also exploring opportunities to work with new partners such as the reinsurance industry and the technology industry. He says one concept for a good partnership between the public and private sector is the idea of “climate proofing cities.” “If for example we could climate proof a city. If for example we could finance the public investment to climate proof areas where poor people live, maybe we could then work with the reinsurance and insurance industry to get those people catastrophic insurance,” he says. Public Private Partnership “We provide a lowering of the public risk, while the private sector offers private risk instruments to poor people. It could be a very good partnership it seems to me between the public sector and the private sector.” Johnson says the concept would involve making sure the standards of buildings and roads are at a level to “withstand the tremendous variability in weather patterns, such as storm damage, that we have witnessed over the last few years, and that will, we believe, in a climate change future, become more intensified.” “So it’s how do we get the right standards in place so that the infrastructure of the next 20 or 30 years is able to withstand some of the impacts that will come out of climate change.” Investment Framework In response to the call by the G8 summit, the Bank has already held meetings and begun work on the creation of an investment framework for clean energy and sustainable development. Johnson says the framework is designed to be comprehensive – to assess needs over the next 10, 20 and 30 years; what are the priorities and how can those priorities be financed in a prudent and sensible manner. “So what we’re doing is first looking at the whole range of issues associated with investment, from reducing emissions to the management of carbon storage, through to impacts and how we deal with the impacts of climate change, all the way through to long term adaptation for example, in agriculture where we will need new crop varieties to deal with heat and water tolerance.” A second part of the strategy is to look at infrastructure and climate proofing development – ensuring the infrastructure built for tomorrow is resilient to climate change. “But equally we’re saying that natural resources are also important. There’s lots of evidence to suggest that natural ecosystems have a very important role to play in lowering the impact of climate change.” The third part of the strategy is building up knowledge within countries the Bank deals with to ensure they’re well positioned to cope with the effects of climate change. London Meeting Johnson was speaking prior to his departure for London, where he, along with the Bank’s vice president for infrastructure, Kathy Sierra, will take part in the ministerial meeting called by the UK Government. The UK Government says it intends to carry the momentum around climate change generated from the G8 summit through the rest of its presidency of the G8 this year. The ministerial meeting is an integral part of that plan. Johnson says he’s hoping the meeting will see a continuation of the debate of how to put together a broad and comprehensive framework to deal with all aspects of climate change. “We are talking about leaving a future for our children and for their children. So it is a long term issue. But at the moment, in a funny sort of way, we have short term money and we have medium term targets on climate change under the Kyoto Protocol to deal with a long term issue. “We do need to get some re-alignment so that we do recognize it as a long term issue and start taking the prudent sensible measures today that will protect our planet for tomorrow.”
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