5 Dec 2024
The costs are adding up
For many years the impacts of pollution and destruction of the environment were dismissed by many as the cost of doing business. They held that the benefits to people outweighed the losses. But that argument is getting weaker all the time. In late November the UN Climate Change Conference (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan decided that wealthy nations would pay the poor $300 billion per year in support by 2035, up from a current target of $100 billion. It’s only a down payment. A group of leading economists has estimated that poorer countries need to about US$1 trillion year in outside funding in addition to spending about the same amount from their own resources to make a transition to clean energy to cope with extreme weather.
Another conference on land degradation was given an estimate by the United Nations that the world needs to invest at least $2.6 trillion by the end of the decade to restore the world’s degraded land and hold back its expanding deserts. This is at a time of more frequent and severe droughts because of climate change and in a world with a growing population and need for food. A UN-backed study says around 15 million square kilometres of land – an area larger than Antarctica – was already degraded, and was growing by about 1 million square kilometres a year.