“We have requested US$300 million for international adaptation in our budget. There is no money on the table yet, as things have not gelled yet,” he said.
Barbara Stocking, head of Oxfam, said: “Adaptation efforts need to be scaled up. The world’s poorest are the hardest hit, but they have done the least to cause it.”
“Climate change is life or death. It is the new global battlefield,” Nobel peace prizewinner Wangari Maathai told the Guardian. “It is being presented as if it is the problem of the developed world. But it’s the developed world that has precipitated global warming.”
The report is based on data provided by the World Bank, the WHO, the UN, the Potsdam Institute and others, including top insurance companies and Oxfam. The authors accept the estimates carry uncertainties and could be higher or lower. But the paper was reviewed by 10 leading experts including Pachauri, Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and Potsdam’s John Schellnhuber.
Pachauri called it “the most plausible possible estimate of the human impacts of climate change today.”
On Thursday, 20 Nobel prize winners, including Wangari Maathai, Wole Soyinka and US energy secretary Steven Chu, called for a global deal on climate change “that matches the scale and urgency of the human, ecological and economic crises facing the world today.”
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