http://www.enn.com/
Insurer: Warming
Will Bankrupt Global Economy
Climate Change Could Bankrupt Us by 2065
THE HAGUE, The Netherlands,
November 24, 2000 (ENS) - The sixth
largest insurance company has warned that damage to property due
to global warming could bankrupt the world by 2065. Dr. Andrew
Dlugolecki, director of general insurance development at CGNU,
told delegates attending the international climate change summit
in The Hague that the rate of damage caused by changing weather
will exceed the world's wealth.
CGNU is a top five
European life insurer and the United Kingdom's
largest insurance group.
"Property damage
is rising very rapidly, at something like
10 percent a year," he told a briefing at the 6th Conference
of Parties (COP 6) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate
Change, yesterday.
"We've still not
yet really begun to see the effects of climate
change in the West. What we are seeing so far is largely the
result of more people living in areas which are becoming more
dangerous.
"But once this
thing begins to happen, it will accelerate
extremely rapidly, as the IPCC report makes clear."
Dlugolecki contributed
to a Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) report due out next year. The IPCC
consists of more than 2,500 scientists from around the world,
and its first assessment report in 1990 was used as the
basis for negotiating the United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Dlugolecki said that
the current rate of growth of damage of
10 percent a year will exceed Gross Domestic Product by 2065.
He added that the insurance industry was in danger of "running
out of money," to deal with the disasters.
"This stark warning
must help focus the minds of everyone
sitting round the negotiation table at the climate summit,"
said Mark Johnston of Friends of the Earth. "We've all seen
the storm warnings, now we are being told the financial
forecast. These talks must not fail to produce a deal that
will prevent future climate chaos."
Dlugolecki proposes
a more radical approach to climate change
than is being discussed at COP 6. The concept, known as
contraction and convergence, has long been promoted by the
London based group the Global Commons Institute (GCI).
GCI describes itself
as an independent group of people whose
aim is the protection of the "Global Commons." It fears
the
world may be driven beyond the threshold of ecological
stability by the relentless pursuit of economic growth.
The 10 year old group
has proposed a contraction and
convergence framework under which all countries are
allocated tradable quotas of a global emissions budget.
As the global budget contracts the distribution between
countries gradually converges, reaching equal per-capita
levels.
Put simply, carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases
caused by human activity must be cut drastically, but
every country should have an equal right to use the fuels
which emit carbon. Huge cuts in emissions from developed
nations should allow a corresponding emissions rise from
developing countries.
"If Contraction
and Convergence is adopted as the tool
for managing CO2 and other greenhouse gases, there will
be a transition to a point (convergence) where future
entitlements to emit will have become proportional to
population," says GCI on its website
In projections, GCI
suggests 2045 will be the year of
convergance. It says population forecasts could become
critical and be the subject of negotiation. "However,
it could be counterproductive to create an incentive
for countries to increase their share of the global
emissions budget through population growth," says CGI.
"We suggest that
a starting position should be that
Annex One countries are treated as stable from 2000
forward, and that non-Annex One countries are treated
as stable from the Convergence year (2045) forward.
Annex One countries
are the 38 industrialized countries,
plus the European Union, committed to making cuts in
greenhouse gas emissions under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
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