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Asia needs $40 billion a year for 'climate proofing': Asian Development Bank

12.03.2012

The Asia-Pacific region needs to spend about $40 billion a year to "climate proof" its economies against the impact of global warming, Asian Development Bank vice president Bindu Lohani said at the Asia-Pacific Climate Change Adaptation Forum on Monday. The Forum in Bangkok was cancelled last year after Thailand suffered its worst floods in half a century, which killed more than 800 people and deluged hundreds of thousands of homes. "As the region's economies become increasingly linked through commercial supply chains... the impacts of such disasters are no longer confined to the place of occurrence but have wider regional and local impacts," Lohani said, noting that the Thai floods disrupted supply chains for Japanese automakers. "Although developed countries have agreed to mobilise up to $100 billion by 2020 for mitigation and adaptation, this impressive figure, actually we need to have it today and I think we may even need more," he said.

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