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NUSA DUA, Indonesia: Representatives from some of the world's poorest nations Tuesday appealed for help in dealing with crippling floods, droughts and other extreme weather caused by climate change.
As nearly 190 countries gathered on Indonesia's resort island of Bali to try and hammer out a roadmap for creating a fresh pact to combat global warming, poor countries said any new deal must give them more money.
"Financially we do not have enough to adapt to the impact," said Thy Sum, a conference delegate from Cambodia's Climate Change Office.
"We need to call on the rich countries to provide meaningful financial and technical support to cope with climate change."
A landmark paper by the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said earlier this year that while industrialised countries are largely to blame for global warming, least developed nations will suffer most.
The group of scientists warned that damage to the Earth's weather systems this century will doom poor countries to worse hunger, water stress and damage from violent storms, droughts and floods.
Such dire consequences are already being felt in some countries, experts said here.
"What we are experiencing in Bangladesh is exactly what the climate change scientists are predicting," said Mozaharul Alam, from the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies.
Bangladesh saw at least 3,400 people killed in a cyclone last month, with hundreds more missing feared dead and 360,000 left homeless.
Relief agency Oxfam said that current levels of aid to poor nations to deal with climate change are "an insult", and said poor countries needed 50 billion US dollars a year to adapt to global warming.
"We believe the rich and the most polluting countries should pay the vast share of that money," said Oxfam campaigner Charlotte Sterrett.
For Ursula Rakova, an activist from the low-lying Carteret Islands in Papua New Guinea, the need is immediate.
Rising sea levels are forcing island residents out of their homes and on to the mainland where food, medicine and education need to be paid for.
"Our atolls are shrinking, the population is getting bigger. We don't have any land anymore," she said at a press conference on the sidelines of the Bali meeting, which runs until December 11.
Delegates aim to agree on an agenda for negotiations for a new pact to come into effect when the current phase of the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. - AFP/ac
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