"We lost in 72 hours what took us 50 years to build"

President Carlos Flores, Honduras, following Hurricane Mitch.

According to the IPCC climate change is set to cause a dramatic increase in the number of natural catastrophes and poses a mounting threat to some of the most populated parts of the globe. Munich Re, the world's biggest re-insurer has calculated that natural disasters in the decade 1990-99 caused economic losses of US $629.2 billion and insured losses of US $118.8 billion, an increase by factors of 8.1 and 14.9 respectively, on 1960's costs. Wind and flood damage accounted for 85% of economic losses and 96% of insured losses.

Clearly, the heavily indebted countries of the world will have less capacity to withstand and recover from the financial impacts of climate change. It will mean that scarce resources will be further depleted trying to rebuild after hurricanes or relocate environmental refugees after floods. For example, Honduras' debt service represented 80% of government revenue, while Nicaragua's is estimated to be around half of all revenue. At the time of Hurricane Mitch, Honduras and Nicaragua were paying debt service at a rate of $US 2.2 million per day. The total cost of damage from the hurricane was estimated at $3.8 billion.

The injustice of climate change centres on the fact that the world's poor - in both developed and undeveloped countries -- have neither contributed to the problem to a substantial degree nor benefited financially from the fossil fuel industry. With climate change, it's the poor who pay, not the polluter.

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