World Bank Says Katrina a Wake-Up Call
September 12th, 2005Sept 8, 2005 – According to Ian Johnson, the World Bank’s vice president for environmentally and socially sustainable development, Hurricane Katrina may serve as a wake-up call on climate change for vulnerable, low-lying developing nations.
“Just think of the catastrophic impact it’s had in a country that’s pretty well organized, and pretty rich.Transfer that to a country that isn’t and may not have the same level of capacity to deal with these sorts of things,” Johnson said in an interview. “Katrina is a terrible tragedy, but maybe it is a wake-up call to all of us to begin understanding what catastrophic events, what damage can occur,” he added. Johnson said the World Bank is working with private industry to find ways to protect poor nations from the expected environmental shifts linked to global warming. He said it was important to draw lessons from the United States’ experience with the storm and its aftermath.
“There is a real sense that the train has left the station, and that there is going to be a pretty significant impact of climate change,” Johnson said, commenting the devastation in New Orleans had increased public sensitivity to these risks. “Certainly in the press, it seems to have raised questions of the extent to which this is part of a global warming world,” he said. “I do think that public opinion is thinking a lot about these issues.”
In order to protect vulnerable regions, such as low-lying areas and those subject to landslides, Johnson said the World Bank was seeking to spur investment in flood controls and levees and to encourage stricter building standards. Other ideas include greater reliance on water-resistant or drought-resistant crops to maintain agricultural productivity should weather patterns change, he said, adding new insurance products could also help those who would otherwise lose everything in a disaster.
“It is the poor who suffer disproportionately in these events because they tend to be the least capable of resisting, they’re not as resilient, they are typically located and live in the areas that are most
vulnerable,” he said. “One hopes there will be positive lessons from this that we can apply, because it has been an awful, awful tragedy.” ( Laura MacInnis, Reuters, 9/8/05).
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