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When your immediate concern is how and where to get your next bowl of rice, place to sleep, clothes to wear, water to drink and even place to defecate, believe me, the idea that the whole world will suffer together with you some time in the future soon, do look very seductive!

How developing countries are adapting or preparing to adapt to the impacts of global climate change? Why must they do something about something that is perhaps the least of priorities? There are just too many immediate pressing daily problems to overcome and climate change? What climate change?

Developing countries are not doing anything to combat global climate change, because to begin with, the per capita carbon and other climate change contributing factors footprint are negligible, compared to the developed world.

In other words, what can we expect the dung stove user to switch to? He already could not afford any fossil fuel generated electricity and even if by any chance he could afford, he has no access to it because "development" has not reached him.

We may wish that developing countries do their part towards combating climate change by not cutting down forests, adopting cleaner energy alternatives like renewable energy, reuse, reduce and recycle but in reality, developing countries can do not much because they also contribute little per capita to the total amount of green house gases released into the atmosphere through human activities.

It is the developed world that contributed the most per capital green house gases by their so called energy gashing and wasteful lifestyles and realistically, for any climate change abating action to be effective, it must start from the developed countries.

This might sound like a pun, but really, we ought to save our energy by not going after the developing countries, but instead concentrate on the people in the developed countries.

As a more educated populace and seemingly wealthier too, we have more to lose in the event of a climate change impact and it therefore to our interest and our children and children children's interest that we do something not to mitigate the negative effects of climate change brought about entirely by our fore fathers' and our own sins.

The people in the developing world contribute little, if any to climate change and if at all we still have the conscience, we ought to look into ways to help them adapt and mitigate the impacts brought about by our sinful actions to satisfy our own greed for convenience derived from the so called "modern age living".

Don't ask what the poor can do to help the rich, ask what the rich ought to do to help the poor because the poor has nothing more to lose, but the rich; everything!

Learn more about this author, Alex Kee.
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