Developing countries stand to suffer the worst effects of global warming, and should not have to pay for a problem created mainly by the rich, executives and experts said on Thursday.
At a gathering of 2,400 of the world's most powerful people at Davos, a ski resort in the Swiss Alps, leaders from emerging nations said they wanted the United States, European Union and others in the West to be more accountable for the heat-trapping emissions their cars and factories produce. They also asserted their right to stoke their own economies, even if greenhouse gas levels rise as a result.
"We, as a billion people, are going to be consuming a lot of services and goods that will create emissions. We will need technology, we will need money," said Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of the telecommunications company Bharti Enterprises.
On the World Economic Forum's opening day on Wednesday, with freezing temperatures ending a balmy start to the Swiss winter, participants voted climate change as most likely to have an impact on the world in years ahead, as well as the issue global leaders are least ready for.
Leaders from rich countries have acknowledged the need for action to address the impacts of global warming for emerging nations, but made no major commitments to help during the World Economic Forum sessions.
Barbara Stocking, director of Oxfam Britain, said the poor were particularly squeezed by growing calls to limit use of fossil fuels, which trap solar rays in the atmosphere and contribute to severe storms and ecological damage.
They are also most vulnerable to global warming's effects, including irregular rainfall, floods and droughts that have decimated fertile lands and made subsistence farming difficult in much of Africa, as well as Afghanistan, Haiti and elsewhere.
"We have already seen that the effects of climate change are hitting poor people hardest and earliest," she said in an interview in Davos on Thursday. In addition to "big sums of money" that would be required to help countries cope with these impacts, Stocking said emerging countries must be allowed some slack to expand their industries and create wealth.
"We must not stop developing countries in their economic development by imposing strict restrictions on carbon emissions that we do not have ourselves," she said.
World Bank senior advisor on values and ethics Katherine Marshall, in Davos for the talks, called it "morally and practically unacceptable" for poor countries to be asked to "forgo development with global warming in mind."
"The ethical path calls for aggressive action to bring development, coupled with aggressive action to press new technologies and to support their application in poor and rich countries alike," she told Reuters by e-mail.
Nicholas Stern, advisor to the British government on climate change, said international aid could help poorer countries cope. "This is not about stopping growth. It is about doing things in different ways," he told Reuters Television in Davos.
Ensuring that emissions-saving technologies reach emerging giants such as China and India, as well as poorer countries, is critical, he said, adding: "I think that rich countries should shoulder the bulk of that cost."
Others said that more stringent monitoring of emissions from the Western powers - by far the biggest source of accumulating greenhouse gases - would help assuage emerging nations. "Maybe we could have an international task force to have some sort of enforcement for the countries that are committed in the Kyoto Protocol, and also for the countries like the United States that are not committed but must reduce their emissions," Brazil's trade and industry minister Luiz Fernando Furlan said.
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