Can we hope for global cooperation?

A major new World Bank report titled ‘World Development Report 2010’ concludes that the world can fight poverty and climate change at the same time. But it won't be easy, and it won't be cheap. So, anything new about that?? We did know it will be tough.

The biennial global economic assessment, which this year focuses exclusively on the threat of climate change, estimates that nations will need nearly $500 billion annually by 2030 to both develop clean energy technologies across the world and cope with natural disasters.

The report calls on governments, research institutions and individuals to overcome a worldwide "inertia" of dependence on fossil fuel. The World Bank study estimates that poor nations will bear between 75 and 80 percent of the cost of floods, increased desertification and other disasters caused by global warming.

Among the near-term impacts of climate change, the authors estimated that India's crop yields would likely decline 4.5 to 9 percent within the next three decades.

What is needed is decisive, immediate action, they say. Finally!

In a related study, a group of environmental scientists and economists propose a much stronger focus on regional and worldwide cooperation to deal with human-caused crises.

The researchers, writing in Science, say that “energy, food and water crises, climate disruption, declining fisheries, ocean acidification, emerging diseases and increasing antibiotic resistance are examples of serious, intertwined global-scale challenges spawned by the accelerating scale of human activity,” have proven beyond national governments and institutions to deal with adequately.

Since these crises are planet-wide, they require a much more cooperative, i.e. global, response, according the group of economists and scientists, who themselves represent an international front coming from Australia, Sweden, the United States, India, Greece and The Netherlands.

Both studies do not really throw up any newer scenario than has been parrotted by many before them. Both are commendable. But what impact they will have is the question. In times of scarce resources, how many nations will open up rather than shut doors? Hiding behind financial meltdown, how many developed nations will fund mitigation scenarios in the south? How many governments will acknowledge that the future is threatened, and work to avert threats? Very few. For it takes the brave, and the brave seem a small number today. It may well take a strong force to dislodge us from our collective inertia.