BANGKOK, Thailand - Aid agencies said Tuesday that the rise in Asian weather disasters should serve as a wake-up call for negotiators to intensify their efforts to reach a global deal on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Pointing to recent typhoons, floods and droughts in Asia, World Vision and the Red Cross said poor nations like the Philippines and Vietnam will be the ones to suffer most if world leaders fail to reach a climate pact by the end of the year.
"Today marks the 60-day countdown to the Copenhagen summit," said Richard Rumsey, World Vision's director of disaster risk reduction and community resilience.
"World leaders must not ignore the devastating impact of these climate-related disasters -- the loss of lives and the horrific aftermath for families and communities who have lost everything and are left to pick up the pieces," he said. "We must make the poor a central part of our decisions here in Bangkok and all the way to Copenhagen."
Negotiators are meeting at the UN climate talks in Bangkok in an effort to reduce a 200-page draft agreement to something more manageable. The meeting is the second to last before world leaders meet in Copenhagen to negotiate a new climate pact that would replace the Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012.
For months, negotiations have been deadlocked. UN climate chief Yvo de Boer told The Associated Press last week that there was growing frustration among developing countries that they are offering to take action to reduce their own emissions but were not seeing comparable commitments from rich countries.
They also are demanding that rich countries commit to providing the US$75 billion to $100 billion annually through 2050 that the World Bank and others say will be needed to help countries adapt to the impacts of climate change.
China on Monday accused rich countries Monday of slowing progress at the talks, contending they are spending their energy trying to dismantle the Kyoto Protocol rather than negotiating the hard targets necessary to reduce emissions.
It is not possible to blame any one disaster on climate change and there is a healthy debate among scientists over what role, if any, warming temperatures contribute to causing more frequent and destructive tropical storms.
Rumsey acknowledged the debate, but he and other aid groups said they have all the evidence they need to begin factoring climate change into their planning.
"It seems very clear there are humanitarian impacts of climate-related disasters," Rumsey said, adding that his agency has had to shift significant resources from long-term aid projects to disaster relief in the past decade.
Madeleen Helmer, who heads the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Center in the Netherlands, said weather-related disasters have increased from 200 a year in the 1990s to 350 a year since 2000, and the amounts of overseas development assistance going to humanitarian disasters has gone from four per cent to nine per cent.
"We need to make a change in planning, dealing with uncertainties," she said. "In India, after there was an extreme drought, we had extreme floods. What do you prepare for? Climate change is telling us you have to prepare for both."
