By SYED NAZAKAT (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-12-05 06:59

Asia, home to 60 per cent of the world's population, will bear the brunt of global warming as more extreme climatic changes take place within the region.

Yukihiro Nojiri, manager of the Greenhouse Gas Inventory Office in Japan, said global warming would make Southeast Asia more vulnerable to food shortages, natural resource depletion, decline in human health standards, and land degradation in this century.

The United Nations, which is holding a world summit on global warming in Bali, has also stressed that Asia must take serious steps to face the challenge of global warming - with clear targets and timetables for preventing further environmental damage.

As Asia is responsible for 34 percent of global warming gas emissions, "Asia is expected to suffer most from the impacts of climate change," Han Seung-soo, special envoy of the Secretary-General of the United Nations on Climate Change, said.

Rich countries may be largely to blame for adding climate change to Asia's litany of problems, but the continent is also responsible for the drastic climate change in its own region.

"Of course, India has less moral responsibility to cut carbon emissions than the rich, temperate countries of the West. But, arguably, it has more reason to do so," Brahma Chellaney told Asia News Network on the sidelines of the conference.

Chellaney is a professor at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.

The problem is getting worse in Southeast Asia.

"The overall responses in Asia to climate change, both in terms of reducing rates of emission growth and adapting to climate change, are likely to exacerbate or distract from addressing existing social injustices," Louis Lebel, director of Social and Environmental Research, Chiang Mai University, Thailand, said.

The impacts of climate change, Lebel said, will be distributed very unequally as a result of entrenched unfairness in how societies in Asia are developing today.

But while the technological path to climate change action is clear, the politics are getting more complicated. "Climate change is not a matter of science," Chellaney said. "It is a matter of geo-politics. So we need a strong political will to deal with the challenge of climate change."

ASIA NEWS NETWORK

(China Daily 12/05/2007 page11)