Your answer to question must be based on the article below entitled “The accidental environmentalists”:

The accidental environmentalists
Source: www.economist.com
Dec, 11th 2008 (Adapted)

More destructive hurricanes, shrinking forests, melting glaciers, disappearing animals: the prospective damage to Latin America and the Caribbean from climate change makes for grim reading. A new World Bank report, timed to coincide with a United Nations conference in Poland, tries to put numbers to the potential economic cost. By taking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's predictions for what the planet might feel like in 2100 and then overlaying data from several thousand farms situated in regions of varying heat and dryness, it is possible to make some informed guesses about what the effect on crop yields, and therefore on GDP, would be if temperatures rose and rainfall fell.

Some Latin countries are already doing things to reduce net carbon emissions that put them ahead of governments elsewhere. Much of the region's power comes from hydroelectricity and biofuels. The result is that emissions of carbon dioxide per unit of power are 74% lower than in India and China.

There are obstacles to taking these policies further. In Brazil, plans for more hydroelectric dams in the Amazon are opposed by some environmentalists; they claim the resulting flooding of forest prompts methane-producing rotting vegetation.