The report vn the economic assessment of a global climate change meet creates mayhem
ECONOMISTS who sparked off a furore by
valuing the life of a citizen of a developing country at a 15th of an Euro-pean or a us citizen's, faced flak at a meeting in
Geneva of the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (ipcc), held from
July 24-28. The governments of India,
China, Cuba, Brazil and Peru said the
work "contained errors". The economists, who included R K Pachauri of
Tata Energy Research Institute and
David Pearce of University College,
London, have spent the past 2 years
attempting to estimate the level of
resources the world's governments
should plough into halting or slowing
down the rate of global warming.
They have been trying to compare
estimates of the cost of curbing green-house gas emissions (also called abatement costs) with the losses (social costs)
that would result if the global climate
recorded drastic changes. The overall
regults presented at the meeting purported to show that the cost of reducing
greenhouse gas emissions would be
greater than 2 per cent-of the Gross
World Product (GWP) while the losses
would amount to only 1_5 to 2.0 per cent of the GWP.
One of the most surprising aspects
of the report was that it showed that
countries affiliated to the Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development suffered twice the damages as
a result of global warming as did the
rest of the world, despite the fact that
these countries constitute only 20 per
cent of the world's population and they
occupy less than 20 per cent of the world's land area.
"This distributional result reveals
the absurd monetary bias of the methodology used by the economists, remarked Aubrey Meyer of a UK-based NGO.
Although the report accepted that
many more lives would perish due to
global warming in the poorer countries
than the richer ones, they assumed that
increasing economic growth in the
poorer countries may make them the
major emitters of the world.
In response, Richard Tol, a lead
author of a section of the report says,
"The task of the ipcc is to assess and
review literature, and the literature is
largely silent."
The Cuban delegation in fact, rejected the text outright, followed by,Brazil which lodged a formal protest saying
that "there was a very bad feeling about
it". They added that their government
had already rejected it. A special meeting will now be organised in Montreal in
October this year, to debate a revised report.
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