The relative impact of climate change will be far different in the developed and developing worlds. A study examined the relative impact of climate change in the context of a single infrastructure element, paved and unpaved roads. Roads have a significant impact upon communities in terms of maternal health, level of education, poverty, gender equity, economic development and transport.
The potential degradation of roads due to climate change presents a significant economic threat, particularly in developing countries. Roads are a lifeline to alleviating poverty since investment in access to rural areas and transport improves the living conditions of the poor.
The potential for road damage and the inability to invest in new road infrastructure could impact the economic stability of communities.
The critical question that needs to be addressed is how climate change affects countries in terms of their ability to absorb the predicted costs.
The study found that a developing country - Bolivia could treble its paved road network by 2100 if expenditures were not diverted to adapting to climate change. However, in comparison, a developed country - Italy's paved road network expansion would be impacted only 4 %. Values in similar range were found for other countries studied.
The study also showed the difference between adapting to climate change and foregoing adaptation. For example, if Bolivia foregoes adaptation, then it will incur approximately $310 million of impact versus $138 million of impact if adaptation policies are put in place. Similar percentages of savings of adapting to climate change vs. not adapting are obtainable for other countries studied.
Relative impact can also be analysed in terms of expenditure percentages. In the study, the developed countries never exceed 1% of expenditures for climate adaptation in any decade of the 21st century. In contrast, the developing countries regularly experience double-digit expenditures during each decade.
The lower-income countries suffer from a dual issue. First, these countries cannot afford to expend as much resources as is required on their road infrastructure. For example, Bolivia expends just 0.36% of GDP or $163 million on roads while Japan expends 4.33% of GDP or $179 billion on its road infrastructure. To compensate, many lower-income countries depend on unpaved or gravel roads as the basis for the country infrastructure.
This lack of spending leads to the second related issue, the dependence on the roads in place. Since the road network in lower-income countries lacks the density (0.06 km/km2 in Bolivia) of that found in higher-income countries (3.16 km/km2 in Japan), communities are overly dependent on the minimum number of roads in place. Thus, the value of each road in terms of dependence is higher where the road network lacks sufficient density
A stark illustration is here in these figures : in 1997, all of Africa (excluding South Africa) had 171 000 km of paved roads, about 18% less than Poland - a single, middle income country of Europe.
In summary, the total expenditure on climate change was found to not reflect the relative impact of climate change on the selected countries, as developed countries spend far more on road infrastructure - but the impact of climate change on their road network will impact their economies much less. Rather, the opportunity to further develop road infrastructure is the measure which reflects the importance of the expenditure shift to the selected countries.
Developing countries will be forced to transfer a significant amount of annual expenditures to offset the effects of climate change on road infrastructure. This poses a question whether they can continue on a designed development path rather than being forced to reduce or abandon these plans due to the need to redirect funds to climate change adaptation.
Acknowledgement : The blog post above has been sourced from this article.
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