World Bank worried about environmental management in former Communist countries

Europe and Central Asia are face significant climate change threats, but is in 'adaption deficit', reads a report of the World Bank (WB), which urges countries to pursue climate-resilient development, the WB announces in a release quoted by Info-Prim Neo. On June 2, the World Bank warned that the impact of climate change in the Europe and Central Asia Region will be more significant than expected due to a lingering post-Soviet legacy of environmental mismanagement and the poor state of much of the Region’s infrastructure, leaving the countries poorly prepared to adapt. “Europe and Central Asia suffers from an ‘adaptation deficit’ that is already challenged by recent climate variability,” said Marianne Fay, Director of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2010, and author of the new report ‘Adapting to Climate Change in Europe and Central Asia’, “which will only worsen with the consequences of projected trends in climate in the coming decades.” The report was launched at UN-brokered debates, organized in the German city of Bonn. The reunion is dedicated to the climate change on the occasion pf the World Environment Day marked on June 5. Fay added that “While almost two decades have passed since the breakup of the Soviet Union and its partner countries in Central and Eastern Europe, the legacy of environmental mismanagement and oversized infrastructure in countries outside the European Union still remains a dangerous holdover from the past. It greatly worsens the countries’ vulnerability to even modest changes in the climate.”. The report says that, contrary to popular perception, the Region is significantly threatened by climate change and is already experiencing the consequences: increasing variability, warmer temperatures, changing hydrology, and more extremes – droughts, floods, heat waves, as well as windstorms and forest fires.