Asia needs to spend much more to adapt to climate change and limit its damage, bank study says

BANGKOK — Asian countries will be hit harder than other regions by the climate crisis and are lagging far behind in spending on improvements to limit damage and adapt to changing weather patterns and natural disasters, the Asian Development Bank said in a report released Thursday.

The report says developing countries in Asia’s climate finance needs range from $102 billion to $431 billion a year. This far exceeds the $34 billion allocated for this purpose in 2021-2022, the Philippines-based Manila Regional Development Bank said.

The report said developing Asia accounted for nearly half of all global emissions in 2021, the latest year for complete data, with China accounting for two-thirds of that and South Asia nearly 20%. That’s because while per capita emissions remain much lower than Europe, Japan and North America, it is the world’s most populous region, home to about 70% of all humanity.

Most countries in the region have ratified climate change treaties and submitted national plans to reduce carbon emissions, but most still lack clear roadmaps to achieve net zero carbon emissions, the report says.

To counter moves to rely more on renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, regional governments have committed $600 billion to support fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal in 2022, it said. Subsidies make fuel cheaper, hindering the transition to cleaner energy.

The rate of sea level rise is about double the global average in the Asia-Pacific region, and about 300 million people in the region would face the risk of coastal flooding if Antarctica’s sea ice collapses, the report said. Increased storm surges also mean China, India, Bangladesh and Vietnam will be hit hardest, with damage averaging $3 trillion a year.

At the same time, warmer temperatures are harming workers’ productivity and health, the report said, estimating that regional economies’ gross domestic product could shrink by 17% by 2070 under a worst-case scenario of high carbon dioxide emissions. This scenario would also lead to a doubling of the destructive power of tropical cyclones and storms as weather becomes more unstable and extreme.

The trends are already “locked in” and warming will continue for decades, although the full impacts of climate “tipping points” such as warming seas and melting polar ice caps are not fully understood, the report says. Meanwhile, environments that typically “sink” carbon emissions, such as oceans and rainforests, are changing so dramatically that they are instead becoming sources of carbon emissions from wildfires and other events.

The report argues that the benefits of limiting and adapting to climate change far outweigh the costs. The ADB estimates that “aggressive decarbonization” could create 1.5 million jobs in the energy sector by 2050, and prevent up to 346,000 deaths per year from air pollution by 2030.

By some estimates, poverty could increase by 64–117% by 2030 under a high-emissions climate scenario compared to no climate change, and the entire regional economy could fall by around 17%. The largest declines are forecast in Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia and India, and will deepen over time.

The biggest losses will come from lost productivity, followed by fishing, floods and agriculture, the report said.

But governments can take action to reduce the worst damage, the report says, pointing to the example of flood shelters in Bangladesh, which have reduced deaths from catastrophic storms from hundreds of thousands in the past to fewer than 100 in recent years through 2020.

“The impacts of climate change cannot be avoided, so stronger policy action is needed to minimize loss and damage,” the report says.