Читать книгу Climate Change For Dummies - Elizabeth May - Страница 31

The effects of climate change are taking a particularly heavy toll on the populations of developing countries — countries with little or no industry development and a weak or unstable economy. These countries, which are primarily located in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, have fewer financial resources to recover from events such as flooding, major storm damage, and crop failures. Money that these nations have to spend paying for the effects of global warming is money that they can’t spend building their economies.

Developing countries have little or no major industry development, for the most part (although China has overtaken the United States as the world’s largest polluter), so they don’t add many GHG emissions to the atmosphere. Even China, with its growing industry, lags far behind the emissions of industrialized nations on a per-person basis. Because industrialized countries have been the primary GHG emitters, they have the main responsibility for reducing emissions, and they can also play a role in helping developing countries shift to renewable energy sources and adapt to climate impacts. For more about how developing nations are addressing climate change, see Chapter 12.