Adapting to climate change: what's needed in poor countries, and who should pay

Abstract

The impacts are already hitting vulnerable communities, where people are starting to adapt their lives to this reality. In South Africa, less frequent and less reliable rains are forcing farmers to sell their cattle and plant faster-maturing crops. In Bangladesh, villagers are creating floating vegetable gardens to protect their livelihoods from flooding. In Viet Nam, communities are helping to plant dense mangroves along the coast to diffuse tropical-storm waves. Climate change is a challenge to current models of economic growth: all countries will have to find low-carbon paths to development, in order to keep global temperatures to less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. But given their historic role in causing the problem, rich countries now have two extraordinarily clear obligations: to stop harming, by massively cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions, and to start helping, by providing compensatory finance so that poor countries can adapt, before they suffer the full impacts of climate change.