Click here to subscribe today or Login.
Environmental activists display effigies of, from left, U.S. President Barack Obama, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi during a demonstration calling for the world leaders to take immediate action against climate change, in Jakarta, Indonesia.
AP PHOTO
GENEVA — The world needs more innovative projects — like putting weather stations on cellular phone towers across Africa — to help it better predict the increased hurricanes, tsunamis, droughts and floods that climate change will bring, Kofi Annan said Monday.
The former U.N. chief was referring to a new system that brings more accurate weather information to farmers and fishermen in five African nations.
“We cannot hope to manage climate change unless we measure it accurately,” Annan told 1,500 officials, diplomats and scientists as a weeklong U.N. meeting opened on adapting to climate change.
The World Climate Conference in Geneva is seeking to help developing countries generate better data on their own changing climates and share that information with other countries.
This week’s meeting will not discuss the controversial issue of cutting carbon emissions — those talks will come in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December.
In a keynote speech, Annan said wealthy countries must provide large amounts of money, knowledge and equipment to the developing world. He suggested a model should be the project announced in June by his Global Humanitarian Forum to install automated weather stations on mobile phone towers across Africa.
Weather data will be fed into national — and global — networks and sent back to farmers, fishermen and others on Africa’s rapidly expanding cell phone system, alerting “them to storms which threaten crops, livestock and lives,” Annan said.
Phone towers in almost every part of Africa already greatly exceed the continent’s traditional weather monitoring systems, Annan said.