Climate change rises on World Bank agenda

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Climate change is now one of the World Bank's top concerns because of its expected impact on health and economic growth in developing countries, the bank's lead environmental economist said.

Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia are where global warming's damage will disproportionately be felt, and that makes it a key issue for the World Bank and other financial institutions aiming to foster development, said Kirk Hamilton, co-author of the Global Monitoring Report.

The environmental damage is happening now in the world's poorest places and is likely to be exacerbated as the planet warms, with strong consequences as soon as 2020, Hamilton said in a telephone interview.

"I think there's some risk, not just at the World Bank but globally, that some people might think that climate change is flavor of the month but ... we see these deep connections to development," he said.

The bank's shift to considering climate change as an essential factor in calculating development needs has come in the past two years amid bleak predictions from the Stern Commission Report and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

"Scientists are telling us that there are high degrees of confidence that what we're observing is human-induced climate change and that business-as-usual scenarios in terms of emissions of greenhouse gases are leading us into dangerous territory," Hamilton said.

POOR COUNTRIES TO SUFFER MOST

The Global Monitoring Report, released in advance of weekend meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington, contains two meaty chapters on global environmental sustainability.