Human Development Report 2007/2008

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) recently released its Human Development Report for 2007/2008, exploring the present and future implications of climate change, particularly for development. Coming just days before the UN conference in Bali on the future of the Kyoto protocol, the report underscores the threat posed by climate change in its potential to precipitate unprecedented reversals in human development; as Kemal Dervis, UNDP Administrator, puts it, “ ...[I]t is the poor, a constituency with no responsibility for the ecological debt we are running up, who face the immediate and most severe human costs.” Specifically, the authors of the report warn of the following:

• • the breakdown of agriculture systems, causing up to 600 million more people to be malnourished;
  • water stress for an additional 1.8 billion people by 2080;
  • displacement of up to 332 million people due to increased flooding and tropical storm activity;
  • and emergent health risks, with up to 400 million more people facing the risk of malaria.

The report estimates that the world will need to spend about 1.6 percent of GDP every year until 2030 to prevent these scenarios from coming to fruition, with a call on developed countries to shoulder the bulk of this burden.