Choppy weather at climate meet

ECONOMISTS who sparked off a furore byvaluing 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 inGeneva of the Intergovernmental Panelon Climate Change (ipcc), held fromJuly 24-28. The governments of India,China, Cuba, Brazil and Peru said thework "contained errors". The economists, who included R K Pachauri ofTata Energy Research Institute andDavid Pearce of University College,London, have spent the past 2 yearsattempting to estimate the level ofresources the world's governmentsshould plough into halting or slowingdown the rate of global warming.

They have been trying to compareestimates of the cost of curbing green-house gas emissions (also called abatement costs) with the losses (social costs)that would result if the global climaterecorded drastic changes. The overallregults presented at the meeting purported to show that the cost of reducinggreenhouse gas emissions would begreater than 2 per cent-of the GrossWorld Product (GWP) while the losseswould amount to only 1_5 to 2.0 per cent of the GWP.

One of the most surprising aspectsof the report was that it showed thatcountries affiliated to the Organizationfor Economic Cooperation and Development suffered twice the damages asa result of global warming as did therest of the world, despite the fact thatthese countries constitute only 20 percent of the world's population and theyoccupy less than 20 per cent of the world's land area.

"This distributional result revealsthe absurd monetary bias of the methodology used by the economists, remarked Aubrey Meyer of a UK-based NGO.

Although the report accepted thatmany more lives would perish due toglobal warming in the poorer countriesthan the richer ones, they assumed thatincreasing economic growth in thepoorer countries may make them themajor emitters of the world.

In response, Richard Tol, a leadauthor of a section of the report says,"The task of the ipcc is to assess andreview literature, and the literature islargely silent."

The Cuban delegation in fact, rejected the text outright, followed by,Brazil which lodged a formal protest sayingthat "there was a very bad feeling aboutit". They added that their governmenthad already rejected it. A special meeting will now be organised in Montreal inOctober this year, to debate a revised report.