CLIMATE CHANGE is a defining global social justice issue, says DFID Secretary of State

Source: The Guardian.
Britain is to increase its spending on research into the effects of climate change on developing countries tenfold to £100m over the next five years, the international development secretary, Douglas Alexander, said yesterday.
The move follows a warning in a United Nations development programme report that climate change would have catastrophic effects on poor countries and reverse decades of development gains.
Alexander said: "Climate change is a defining global social justice issue. If we fail to tackle climate change, we risk condemning the world's poorest people to poverty for generations to come."
The minister said the new money was on top of £75m the Department for International Development was spending on trying to help poor countries adapt to climate change. Last year Britain also announced an £800m fund to help developing countries adapt to clean energy.
It was crucial that poor countries leapfrogged the dirty kind of industrial development that rich countries went through in the past two hundred years and went straight for low-carbon economies.

Full article The Guardian.

AFRICA and the USA: Remarkable Change and Progress in Africa's Economic Development

Source: AllAfrica

On the second leg of a trip to three African countries, the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, Henry M. Paulson, Jr., delivered this address to the Corporate Council on Africa's U.S.-Africa Business Summit in Cape Town.
Africa is a unique continent: diverse in people and heritage, with some of the most spectacular geography and biodiversity on the planet. All too often, however, those who do not know Africa well associate the continent with issues like famine, conflict and disease. Tonight, I will talk about a much different Africa, one with which I suspect most of you are more familiar – a continent of diverse nations increasingly defined by economic opportunity and promise.
Most importantly, I will talk about an Africa where leaders are taking control of their own economic futures and continuing to move beyond reliance on donors.

For the rest of the speech AllAfrica.

Climate change requires flexible economies

We need to address the fundamental impact that climate change will have to our economies as well as to our environment. Identifying and filling so-called “missing markets” in developing countries becomes critical to ensuring that future climate-based shocks do not have an exponentially larger impact on future economic growth globally. Fortunately a suite of potential solutions exist, it is a case of relocating them from Canary Wharf to Bobo Dioulasso.

It is unequivocal that however shocks, risks or threats manifest, the benefits accrue disproportionately to the rich while the costs fall disproportionately to the poor. The poor in any society, particularly developing countries, tend to be those with a less buoyant ‘structure of opportunities’ facing them, and experience more “missing markets”. This is usually evident in poorer access to information, credit and other means of alternative production/ livelihoods.

Regardless of the underlying reason for climate change, it is a shock, risk and threat. Hence, we can expect it will impose costs disproportionately highly on the poorest people, and any benefits there might be will tend to accrue to the richer people.

But how should the developed world address these concerns? If we intend to secure sustainable development:

• Environmentally, we need to be clear about the causes of climate change and efficiently/ rationally address these.
• Socially and economically, we need to find ways to create a new pathway of development that insures the poorest from these shocks.

For the latter, building a stronger ‘structure of opportunities’ in rural areas of developing countries is a starting point and by:

• being creative with our development/ donor money and
• nudging the appropriate industries to provide services where the business case appears weak – credit, insurance, information flows

we stand a good chance of producing more flexible developing economies, more able to adapt to the scale of climate change shock.