Katrina rings alarms on climate change: World Bank

By Laura MacInnis

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Hurricane Katrina may serve as a
wake-up call on climate change for developing nations, many of
which are vulnerable to devastation from global warming, the
World Bank’s top environmental official said on Thursday.

Ian Johnson, the World Bank’s vice president for
environmentally and socially sustainable development, told
Reuters the storm’s heavy damage in the southern United States
would have important implications for poorer countries.

“Just think of the catastrophic impact it’s had in a
country that’s pretty well organized, pretty rich. Transfer
that to a country that isn’t and may not have the same level of
capacity to deal with these sorts of things,” Johnson said in
an interview.

“Katrina is a terrible tragedy, but maybe it is a wake-up
call to all of us to begin understanding what catastrophic
events, what damage can occur,” he added.

In addition to fostering talks on emissions and promoting
clean energy products, Johnson said the World Bank is working
with private industry to find ways to protect poor nations from
the expected environmental shifts linked to global warming.

“There is a real sense that the train has left the station,
and that there is going to be a pretty significant impact of
climate change,” Johnson said, adding the devastation in New
Orleans had increased public sensitivity to these risks.

“Certainly in the press, it seems to have raised questions
of the extent to which this is part of a global warming world,”
he said. “I do think that public opinion is thinking a lot
about these issues.”

In order to protect vulnerable regions, such as low-lying
areas and those subject to landslides, Johnson said the World
Bank was seeking to spur investment in flood controls and
levees and to encourage stricter building standards.

Other ideas include greater reliance on water-resistant or
drought-resistant crops to maintain agricultural productivity
should weather patterns change, he said, adding new insurance
products could also help those who would otherwise lose
everything in a disaster.

While poor people in the New Orleans area were among the
most affected in Katrina’s wake, Johnson said it was not the
World Bank’s role to lend assistance to the United States or
other wealthy developed economies facing environmental risks.

Still, he said it was important to draw lessons from the
United States’ experience with the storm and its aftermath.

“It is the poor who suffer disproportionately in these
events because they tend to be the least capable of resisting,
they’re not as resilient, they are typically located and live
in the areas that are most vulnerable,” he said.

“One hopes there will be positive lessons from this that we
can apply, because it has been an awful, awful tragedy.”