There is widespread agreement among policymakers that cold, hard cash will be an essential element in persuading nations vulnerable to climate change to sign up to a global agreement in Copenhagen in December.
Far less clear: how much cash is needed to do the job.
European ministers have discussed sums up to about $140 billion to be paid each year by more affluent countries to developing countries. Meanwhile, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has estimated the annual global costs of adapting to climate change to be up to $170 billion each year.
This week, academics in Britain presented a report, Assessing the Costs of Adaptation to Climate Change, contending that sums in that range are gross underestimations.
The authors of the report, including experts from institutions including Imperial College London, the London School of Economics, Oxford and Cambridge, criticized the U.N. body in particular for producing its estimates too quickly.
Notably, the authors said the U.N. body had failed to include key industry sectors like energy, manufacturing, retailing, mining, tourism and ecosystems in its estimates.
One of the authors of the new report, Martin Parry of Imperial College, said the real costs of adaptation could be up to three times higher than U.N. estimates, or about $500 billion each year. The high costs of building new infrastructure in regions like Africa, preparing coastal zones for sea level rises and more intense storms, and protecting ecosystems were among Mr. Parry’s multipliers.
Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, in a statement issued Friday, said precise figures on the amount of cash required was unnecessary at this stage. Such estimates “remain a moving target,” he said, adding that “starting to plug the hole right now is more important than determining its exact future size.”
But Mr. de Boer also acknowledged that ensuring that poorer nations could rely on increasing amounts of aid to prepare for the impact of climate change remained an important goal. Those sources of finance need “to be significantly scaled up over time so that funding for climate action in the developing world does not have to be renegotiated every year,” he said.
Global leaders at the U.N. climate conference in December in Copenhagen should “determine the framework that provides clarity on these mechanisms,” he said.