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World Bank plans ‘aggressive’ move on soot, other pollutants
DateSeptember 4, 2013 – 8:19AM
The World Bank said it was planning “aggressive action” to help
developing nations cut emissions of soot and other air pollutants
blamed for causing climate change, in a shift also meant to protect
human health and aid crop growth.
Of its funding to poor nations, almost 8 per cent – $US18 billion
($19.9 billion) from 2007-12 – goes to sectors such as energy,
farming, waste and transport that have a potential to cut emissions, a
bank report said.
The bank said it would shift policy to insist that such projects in
future – it did not predict levels of funding – included a component
to curb air pollution.
“We will try to turn it (the funding) into aggressive action” to cut
the pollutants, Rachel Kyte, vice president of sustainable development
at the World Bank, told Reuters on the sidelines of a meeting a
38-nation group in Oslo looking at ways to cut short-term air
pollution.
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“Anything that delays the pace at which global warming is arriving
buys time for our clients, the poor countries in the world,” Kyte
said.
The bank would look for new ways to help, for instance, reduce
pollution from public transport, curb methane emissions from rice
irrigation, and improve the efficiency of high-polluting cooking
stoves and brick kilns.
Soot comes from sources ranging from wood-burning cooking stoves to
diesel engines. Methane comes from decomposition of plant and animal
matter and from farming, for instance from the digestive tracts of
cattle and sheep.
Environment ministers at the meeting in Oslo of the Climate and Clean
Air Coalition, set up 18 months ago in Washington as a new front in
combating climate change, also outlined projects to cut air pollution
in areas from forestry to gas flaring.
First aid
The focus on short-lived air pollutants is meant to complement efforts
to cut carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from human activities
that a U.N. panel of climate scientists says is the main cause of
global warming.
In a statement, members of the coalition said that cutting the
short-term pollutants could reduce global warming by up to about 0.5
degree Celsius by 2040-50.
That would help achieve a goal, set by almost 200 nations in 2010, of
limiting a rise in global temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius
above pre-industrial times to avoid more heatwaves, floods, droughts
and rising sea levels.
And cutting short-lived pollutants would also protect human health –
six million people worldwide die early every year from air pollution,
it said.
“First aid for the climate can also be first aid for people’s health,”
Norwegian Environment Minister Baard Vegar Soljhell said.
Reducing pollutants “can also help rural economies, with current
estimates showing the potential to save about 50 million tonnes of
crops each year”, the statement said. Pollution poisons plants and can
block sunlight, stunting growth.
The coalition statement did not refer to an academic study last month
that suggested the temperature benefits of an assault on the
short-lived pollutants might be far less, only 0.16 degree Celsius by
2050.
Drew Shindell of NASA, the head scientific advisor to the coalition,
said that report wrongly assumed that air pollution would fall with
economic growth. “That doesn’t automatically happen,” he said.
Reuters