Global climate deal hopes fade
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Emerging Markets

Global climate deal hopes fade

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“It may be difficult to get 190-odd countries to agree on an international deal,” a senior World Bank official tells Emerging Markets

The World Bank is shifting towards a strategy of stimulating bilateral deals between countries keen to tackle global warming issues, as a global deal on climate change seems increasingly out of reach.

Rachel Kyte, the Bank’s vice president for sustainable development, said the recent agreement between China and the United States to phase out production and consumption of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), man-made chemicals that have a major impact on warming, would help save millions of lives.

“I think you are seeing pragmatism now,” she told Emerging Markets in an interview ahead of these meetings. “It may be difficult to get 190-odd countries to agree on an international deal.”

She said reducing the use of methane and black carbon as well as HFCs was very important because of their impact on the atmosphere. Black carbon – also known as soot – accelerates the impact of carbon dioxide emissions by turning snow a grey colour that means it absorbs more heat and melts faster.

“So you save 6 million lives a year because 6 million people die every year from indoor and outdoor pollution; so you could build a coalition around that and get going and produce something that’s very tangible.

“I think the climate world has made the mistake of making everything about climate. It might be easier to build coalitions working around other benefits and the co-benefit is climate reduction. We have a responsibility to pursue every course of action that has an impact because time is not on our side.”

However Kyte insisted on the urgent need for a global deal and urged finance ministers meetings in Washington this week to throw their weight behind getting a multilateral agreement.

“Climate has been locked up in environment ministries and climate change envoys. This is not something that ministries of finance are spending sufficient time on. This is a systemic risk that will affect long-term growth and our job is to bring this issue consistently into the dialogue with ministries of finance.”

Climate change has moved to the top of the World Bank Group’s agenda since the arrival of Jim Yong Kim as president last year. The Bank has warned that failure to prevent temperatures rising by two degrees by 2030 would have disastrous consequences.

It warns that 40% of the land used to grow maize in Africa could no longer support the crop; parts of major cities in South Asia, including Bangkok, could be underwater; and the fish stocks in parts of Southeast Asia could decline by 50%.

Kyte said it would not be possible to achieve the Bank’s headline goals of ending extreme poverty or delivering shared prosperity while climate change was “ravaging economic opportunity”.

“This is front and centre for us,” she said. “It isn’t climate change or development and it isn’t poverty or the environment. We can only achieve economic growth with mitigation in those countries where mitigation is important and investment in resilience for countries that are poor and growing.”

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