Bolivian cities at risk with glacier melt
Posted on December 15th, 2009
Greenwire: The Bolivian city of El Alto could perhaps be the first large urban casualty of climate change.
The glaciers that have been long providing water and electricity to this southwestern Bolivian city and its neighbors are rapidly melting and disappearing. A World Bank report released last year found that many of the glaciers in the Andes would disappear within the next two decades, threatening the water supply and existence of nearly 100 million people.
But a major sticking point of climate change negotiations at Copenhagen continues to be who should pay to help poor countries like Bolivia weather climate change, how much they should pay and where the funds should go.
Economists project the total cost of helping poorer countries adapt to climate change would be $100 billion or more, but thus far, offers of aid have fallen short of such an ambitious sum. On Friday, the E.U. made an initial offer to pay $3.5 billion annually for three years (Elisabeth Rosenthal, New York Times, Dec. 14). – DFM