China should play a lead role in "saving our planet" and if swift actions are not taken to adapt to climate change, the progress of human development in developing countries could "stall or even reverse", according to a UN Human Development Report released in Beijing on Wednesday.
Entitled "Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world", the report says that although China is to become the world's largest source of CO2 emissions over the next decade, "a person from the United States still emits on average five times more carbon than a person in China".
Developing countries such as China, which are "rapidly growing in emissions", should play a lead role to find common solutions in the effort to save our planet, said Khalid Malik, United Nations Resident Coordinator and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Resident Representative in China, at Wednesday's press conference on the launch of the global report in China.
"International technology transfer is crucial to helping reduce carbon emissions in developing countries which are increasingly vulnerable to global climate change," the report said.
"Climate change is now a common concern for all of humanity and should be dealt with through concerted global action," it said.
The report argues that compared to developed countries, which take up 13 percent of world's population and produce over half of CO2 emissions, China has a small per capita carbon footprint by international standards.
By 2015, per capita emissions from China are projected at 5.2 tons, which is about one fourth of the 19.3 tons in the U.S. and a third of the average in developed countries as a whole, the report showed.
"If every person in the developing world had the same carbon footprint as the average person in Canada or the U.S., we would need nine planets to absorb all the pollution. We however have only one planet," said Malik.
The annual report, compiled by a collective of international experts commissioned by the UNDP, has been published since 1990. It deals with topics concerning the "severe challenges faced by the mankind".
The 2007/2008 report, based on the latest findings from the study of climate change, lays a foundation for a key meeting in Bali, Indonesia, to negotiate a successor to the current Kyoto Protocol which aims to achieve a substantial emission reduction by 2012.
Source:Xinhua
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