Asia needs to spend much more to adjust to climate transformation and limit its damage, lender study says

BANGKOK — Countries in Asia will suffer worse damage from the climate crisis than other regions and are falling far behind in spending on improvements to limit the damage and adjust to changing weather patterns and natural disasters, the Asian advancement lender said in a update released Thursday.

The update said capital needs in developing Asian countries to cope with climate transformation range from $102 billion to $431 billion a year. That far exceeds the $34 billion committed to those purposes in 2021-2022, the Manila, Philippines-based regional advancement lender said.

Developing Asia accounted for nearly half of all global emissions in 2021, the latest year for comprehensive data, with China financial reporting for two-thirds of that and South Asia nearly 20%, the update said. That’s because even though emissions per person remain far lower than in Europe, Japan and North America, it is the globe’s most populous region, home to about 70% of all human benevolent.

Most countries in the region have ratified treaties on climate transformation and presented national plans to cut their carbon emissions, but most also still lack obvious road maps to reach “net zero” carbon emissions, the update said.

Countering moves toward greater reliance on renewable vigor such as solar and wind power, regional governments were providing $600 billion in back for fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal in 2022, it said. The subsidies make fuels cheaper, discouraging a shift to cleaner vigor.

The update noted that the rate of sea level rises is about double the global average in the Asia-Pacific and about 300 million people in the region would face the uncertainty of coastal inundation if sea ice in Antarctica collapses. Worsening storm surges also cruel that China, India, Bangladesh and Vietnam would be the most affected, with damage amounting to an average of $3 trillion a year.

At the same period, higher temperatures are hurting worker productivity and health, said the update, which estimated that regional economies might view their gross domestic products decline by 17% by 2070 in a worst-case scenario of high carbon emissions. Such a scenario would also outcome in a doubling of the destructive power of tropical cyclones and storms, as weather grows more volatile and extreme.

The trends are already “locked in,” and warming will continue for decades, though the packed implications of climate “tipping points,” such as warming seas melting polar ice caps, are not fully understood, the update said. Meanwhile, environments that usually would “capture” carbon emissions, such as the oceans and tropical forests, are changing so much that they instead are becoming sources of carbon emissions, through forest fires and other events.

The benefits of limited and adapting to climate transformation far outweigh the costs, the update contended. The ADB estimates that “aggressive decarbonization” could make 1.5 million vigor sector jobs by 2050, while also preventing up to 346,000 deaths a year from air pollution by 2030.

By some estimates, poverty could boost by 64%–117% by 2030 under a high-emissions climate scenario, relative to no climate transformation, and the entire regional economy could fall by about 17%. The worst declines are approximate for Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia and India and will deepen over period.

The update said the largest losses will be through reduced productivity, followed by fisheries, flooding and farming.

But governments can act to reduce the worst damage, the update said, pointing to the example of flood shelters in Bangladesh, which reduced deaths from catastrophic storms from hundreds of thousands of people in the history to fewer than 100 in recent years up to 2020.

“There is no avoiding the impacts of climate transformation, so stronger policy responses are needed to minimize deficit and damage,” it said.