Developing countries dig in heels on climate change

GENEVA, Jan 25 (Reuters) Developing countries stand to suffer the worst effects of global warming, and should not have to pay for a problem created mainly by the rich, executives and experts said today.

At a gathering of 2,400 of the world's most powerful people at Davos, a ski resort in the Swiss Alps, leaders from emerging nations said they wanted the United States, European Union and others in the West to be more accountable for the heat-trapping emissions their cars and factories produce.

They also asserted their right to stoke their own economies, even if greenhouse gas levels rise as a result.

''The US, the Europeans, the OECD countries have for the last 30 to 40 years contributed to greenhouse gases much more than us,'' Rahul Bajaj, chairman of India's second-largest motorcycle maker, Bajaj Auto Ltd., said on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum.

His compatriot Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of the telecommunications group Bharti Enterprises, said developing countries needed incentives to react on climate change.

''We, as a billion people, are going to be consuming a lot of services and goods that will create emissions. We will need technology, we will need money,'' he said.

On the World Economic Forum's opening day yesterday, with falling snow and chill winds ending a balmy start to the Swiss winter, participants voted climate change as most likely to have an impact on the world in years ahead, as well as the issue global leaders are least ready for.

Politicians from rich countries have acknowledged the need for action to address the consequences of global warming for developing countries, but have made no major commitments to help.

POOR SQUEEZED Barbara Stocking, director of Oxfam Britain, said poor countries were particularly squeezed by growing calls to limit the use of fossil fuels, which trap solar rays in the atmosphere, contributing to severe storms and ecological damage.

They are also most vulnerable to global warming's effects, including irregular rainfall, floods and droughts that have decimated fertile lands and made subsistence farming difficult in much of Africa, as well as Afghanistan, Haiti and elsewhere.

''We have already seen that the effects of climate change are hitting poor people hardest and earliest,'' she said in an interview in Davos today.

In addition to ''big sums of money'' that would be required to help countries cope with these impacts, Stocking said emerging countries must be allowed some slack to expand their industries and create wealth.

''We must not stop developing countries in their economic development by imposing strict restrictions on carbon emissions that we do not have ourselves,'' Stocking said.

Nicholas Stern, advisor to the British government on climate change, agreed that international aid would be required to help the developing world cope.

''This is not about stopping growth. It is about doing things in different ways,'' he told Reuters Television on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum.

Ensuring that emissions-saving technologies reach emerging giants such as China and India, as well as poorer countries, is critical, he said, adding: ''I think that rich countries should shoulder the bulk of that cost.'' Others said that more stringent monitoring of emissions from the Western powers -- by far the biggest source of accumulating greenhouse gases -- would help assuage emerging nations on the need to act.

''Maybe we could have an international task force to have some sort of enforcement for the countries that are committed in the Kyoto Protocol, and also for the countries like the United States that are not committed but must reduce their emissions,'' Brazil's trade and industry minister Luiz Fernando Furlan said.

REUTERS MS PM1702