World Bank looking to curb climate change without slowing growth

World Bank looking to curb climate change without slowing growth

A woman tries to move her motorbike through floodwaters in central Binh Dinh Province on Thursday. The World Bank wants to help Vietnam cope with the increasingly dire effects of climate change without affecting the speed of economic growth, an official from the group told Thanh Nien Daily.

“We are looking for very specific and concrete ways to deliver a winwin-win for the private companies, for Vietnam and for the global climate,” Rachel Kyte, vice president of Business Advisory Services at the International Financial Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank group, said in an exclusive interview with Thanh Nien. To this end, IFC aims to help firms become more energy efficient and introduce cleaner production processes, which would benefit the environment while bringing about greater profits due to lower energy bills and lower input production costs, said Kyte, who visited Vietnam on Monday and Tuesday. “We are looking to invest and provide advice for more renewable energy to be installed in Vietnam,” Kyte said, suggesting that new technologies to generate energy from biomass – such as rice husks or wood – and solar energy might be suitable for Vietnam. She said that another IFC goal was to help private companies understand the risks climate change poses to their business in an effort to better help them adapt. “We’re undertaking some pilot studies in some parts of the world to try to understand this perspective better. We hope it will then be something that we can bring to Vietnam as well,” Kyte said. IFC is looking to use public funds in Vietnam to leverage private sector investment more rapidly into cleaner technologies, infrastructure and energy projects. “At IFC, we are concentrating on unleashing the power of the private sector to be a part of the solution to the global climate change, and not simply perceived as a problem,” she said. “It is important to help government set public policies that support and incentivize the use of clean technologies for energy, for transportation, and for building codes that support the use of green building materials.” Kyte said the same goes for public policies that support sustainable management of both publicly or privately owned forest. World Bank officials plan to work with the Vietnamese government on adaptation strategies, while the IFC will work to introduce energy-efficient technologies that can be used at the household level, such as clean lighting and heating, she said. “We will also look at renewable energy that can be used at the village level and distributed at the household level,” Kyte said. “With our strengths in investment in the private sector, we can provide commercially successful business models that bring new clean technologies like heat, power, and light to rural areas in the Mekong as well as elsewhere in Asia.” But Kyte warned that climate change is still a real threat to socioeconomic development in Vietnam. “All sectors will be adversely affected by climate change,” she said, adding that the recent tragic flooding in Vietnam was an example of the increasingly frequent extreme weather events affecting the world. Due to the country’s geographical position, productivity and agriculture in Vietnam is extremely vulnerable to rising sea levels. Rising sea-levels, more intense typhoons, higher temperatures and increased flooding and drought are threatening to drag millions of Vietnamese people back into poverty, according to a recent Oxfam report. Vietnam is among the ten countries most vulnerable to climate change, said the report. Annual temperatures here rose by 0.1 degrees centigrade per decade between 1939 and 2000, and between 0.4 and 0.8 degrees centigrade in its three main cities from 1991 to 2000. The sea level has risen between 2.5 to 3.0 centimeters per decade over the last 50 years, with regional variations, said Oxfam, concluding that Vietnam is one of the top two countries in the world most at risk from a one meter rise in sea level by 2100 and the most at risk in East Asia. CLIMATE CHANGE: A TIMELINE 1827: French scientist Jean-Baptiste Fourier is the first to consider the "greenhouse effect," the phenomenon whereby atmospheric gases trap solar energy, increasing Earth's surface temperature. 1896: Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius blames the burning of fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal) for producing carbon dioxide (CO2), the most polluting of the greenhouse gases today blamed for climate change. 1988: The United Nations sets up a scientific authority to vet the evidence on global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 1990: First IPCC report says levels of man-made greenhouse gases are increasing in the atmosphere and predicts these will cause global warming. 1992: Creation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at the Rio Summit. The UNFCCC now has 192 member countries. 1997: UNFCCC members sign the Kyoto Protocol. Under its first phase, industrialized countries must cut emissions of six greenhouse gases so they are 5.2 percent lower than 1990 levels by the end of 2012. 2001: The Kyoto Protocol, still in framework form, is nearly wrecked after it is abandoned by the United States, then the world's biggest carbon emitter. 2005: Kyoto Protocol takes effect on February 16. 2007: Landmark report by the IPCC delivers crippling blow to climate skeptics. It says the evidence for global warming is "unequivocal" and forecasts warming of 1.8-4.0 degrees C (3.2-7.2 degrees F) by 2100 and an unquantifiable rise in sea levels. Nobel Peace Prize awarded to IPCC and former US vice president Al Gore, whose documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" raised climate change awareness. UNFCCC members including the US agree after marathon talks in Bali, Indonesia, to agree on a new treaty in Copenhagen by the end of 2009 that will succeed Kyoto. In 2008: September - A consortium of scientific researchers, the Global Carbon Project (GCP), says greenhouse gas emissions have scaled new peaks, reports that China has leapfrogged the US as the world's biggest carbon emitter and India is heading for third place. November - Barack Obama is elected president of the US, pledges to reverse Bush's climate policy. Sees goal of reducing US emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and by 80 percent by 2050, using a cap-and-trade system and a 10-year program worth US$150 billion in renewable energy research and deployment. December 1-12 - UNFCCC parties meet in Poznan, Poland, to hammer out negotiation blueprint in the run-up to the December 2009 deadline. (Source: AFP)