Climate Change and the Developing World

The United Nations Development Program delivered some dire news Wednesday in its annual Human Development Report. By midcentury, it said, the development progress of the poorest countries will be halted or even reversed if bold steps are not taken to forestall the effects of climate change.

“The poorest countries’ really remarkable and often overlooked progress in recent decades now faces this calamity down the road,” said William Orme, a spokesman for the agency. “If their progress is stopped because we developed countries didn’t do things that we could have, it adds a huge moral imperative to take action sooner rather than later on climate change.”

The study tracks 187 countries and territories in the U.N.’s human development index, which is based on composite measurements of health, education and income, and has tracked global living standards since 1990.

From 1970 to 2010, countries in the lowest 25 percent of the rankings improved their scores by a striking 82 percent, twice the global average. If this pace of improvement continues over the next 40 years, the report says, most of these countries would achieve standards equal to or better than those now enjoyed by the top 25 percent.

But models of future scenarios cast doubt that this progress will come to pass.

Factoring in the effects of global warming on weather, food production and pollution, the index’s average score drops 8 percent worldwide from what would otherwise be predicted (and it drops by 12 percent in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia). In the more adverse “disaster” scenario — which entails vast deforestation, dramatic biodiversity declines and increasing extreme weather — the global index falls by 15 percent, with the deepest losses felt in poor regions.

Providing electricity to the 1.5 billion people — 45 percent of them in Africa — who currently live without it would be a step in the right direction, Mr. Orme says. Electricity means children can study at night, electric stoves can be used instead of pollution-emitting coal, and people can have access to a wider community through television or radio. “We can do this without increasing global CO2 by even 1 percent,” he says.

The agency proposes an international tax on foreign exchange trading to raise $40 billion toward that goal. And it says reducing carbon-dioxide emissions in developed nations — Denmark, for example, has pledged to cut emissions by 40 percent within the decade — can be achieved without lowering living conditions.

As for the United States, it ranked fourth over all in the development index. But when the rankings were adjusted for “internal inequalities,” the United States fell to 23rd, from 13th last year, mainly because of inequalities in income and health care, the report says.

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