INTERVIEW - Icy Nordics Doubt Net Gains From Global Warming
Date: 13-Mar-07
Country: NORWAY
Author: Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
While Nordic nations could experience less snow and longer growing seasons, damaging side-effects of climate change on fisheries may wipe out any gains.
A UN report due in April is likely to say that northern Europe will be among regions to gain from moderate warming, scientists say. A 2006 British report said Scandinavia could have net benefits from a 2-3 Celsius (3.6 to 5.4 F) rise.
"Norway can get higher income if there is more mild weather. There will be better conditions for growing crops and longer growing seasons -- perhaps sweeter apples and cherries because there is more sunshine," Helen Bjoernoy told Reuters.
"But a rising temperature in the oceans could have dramatic consequences for fisheries," she said. "Spawning grounds for cod and herring might shift. That could create big economic problems."
"It's impossible to say what the bottom line will be," she added. "You can have positive effects on some sectors and very negative ones in others."
Still, she said the Nordic nations -- Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway and Iceland -- would not be hardest hit because they could adapt to change. In many cases, for instance, farming regions could be moved north in sparsely populated nations.
"The whole of the Nordic region belongs to the area that can adapt," she said. "We are among the world's richest countries."
And she said developed nations had to remember that their emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels, were stoking a wider warming that was likely to have damaging effects. Almost all scientists say warming will bring more floods, heatwaves, droughts and rising sea levels.
POOR TO SUFFER
"There is no doubt that the big challenges are for the poorest people in the world who do not have the same ability to adapt," she said.
The British Stern Review last year, the most detailed study of the economic impacts of climate change, said there could be "net benefits" for Scandinavia with higher farm yields, fewer deaths in winter, lower heating bills and perhaps more tourism.
But it said that biodiversity -- the variety of animal and plant life -- could suffer. Global warming is heating the Artic regions faster than others further south.
Bjoernoy said there was a widening realisation of a need to act to curb global warming, including in nations such as the United States where President George W. Bush opposes the UN's Kyoto Protocol for capping emissions of greenhouse gases.
She praised the European Union for agreeing at a summit on Friday to triple use of renewable energies by 2020 and to axe emissions of greenhouse gases by 20 percent below 1990 levels by the same date. Norway has not yet set such long-term goals.
Norway has not yet set long-term goals. Bjoernoy said Norway would reach its Kyoto target of limiting gains in emissions to one percent over 1990 levels by 2008-12 even though emissions are now 8.5 percent over target.
