Ready Or Not.(global warming)(Cover story)

Byline: Barrett Sheridan

America is scared of global warming. in a recent poll by Yale's Center for Environmental Law and Policy, 83 percent of Americans called global warming a "serious" problem, up from 70 percent in 2004, and 63 percent agreed that the United States "is in as much danger" from environmental threats including global warming "as it is from terrorists."

If even gas-guzzling Americans are alive to the danger, you know most nations now accept climate change as real. But how will they adapt? Some are well positioned to weather changes in climate that will affect agriculture, trade, housing and poverty; others aren't. To identify who's ready and who's not, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asked some scientists to turn their attention to assessing countries at risk. One groundbreaking recent study by Columbia University's Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), came up with a way to rank nations by how prepared they are to adapt to climate change, given their physical exposure to the expected symptoms of global warming (do they have a long coastline? Do they sit in storm paths?).

The list puts in stark relief a central irony of climate change--that the biggest carbon emitters stand to gain the most, or lose the least, in a warming future. Western nations rode their coal-fired locomotives and gas-guzzling automobiles to levels of wealth the world has never seen before, yet now that the destructiveness of this path is clear, they are emerging as the least vulnerable to warming. At the same time, they are asking more-vulnerable nations, particularly emerging powers like China and India, to make costly investments in alternative sources of energy and other measures to combat global warming. Both the rich and the poor are going to have to invest billions to adapt--for instance, they'll have to redesign seaside urban areas as sea levels rise --but the costs obviously hit the least wealthy hardest. In fact one of the most profound economic changes of our time--the rapid rise of India and China relative to the west--could conceivably be slowed if not reversed by global warming. The countries at the top of the list--the ones least vulnerable to climate change--are rich economies of the north. The Baltic countries of Sweden, Finland and Norway hold the top three spots; Canada comes in at fifth place, and the United States rings in at ninth (China is 52nd and India 74th).

A high rank does not imply invincibility: most top 10 countries have long coastlines--Canada's stretches for 200,000 kilometers--making sea-level rises a dangerous prospect. Rather, the countries in top places exhibit the broad range of socioeconomic conditions and institutions necessary to adapt successfully to the global-warming threat by, for example, designing efficient evacuation systems, or building sea walls. Japan (no. 6) already has a sophisticated warning system that issues alerts for storms and dangerous tides.

Other well-off countries are also thinking about adaptation, and wondering how the challenges they've faced in the past will change as the climate warms. The Netherlands (14) has spent centuries adapting to their low-lying terrain, and they're already looking at how rising sea levels will affect existing dikes and barriers. Conversely, in Israel (25) the problem has always been too little water--and it's a problem that global warming will likely worsen. The Israeli cabinet is studying the issue, and plans to have a comprehensive water security strategy within four years.

At the bottom of the list one finds "the usual suspects," says Gary Yohe, a Wesleyan University economist who helped craft the CIESIN list. They're largely found in impoverished sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Many of the most vulnerable nations are singled out in IPCC reports for various risks. Parts of Bangladesh, for example, can expect more-frequent flash floods. Meanwhile, a rise in water-surface ...