Report: Climate change crisis 'catastrophic'
Pastor Dale Morgan
Report: Climate change crisis 'catastrophic'*
* Story Highlights
* Report says 300 million vulnerable to climate change, number set
to double
* Developing countries expected to suffer worst affects as
temperatures rise
* 300,000 lives are lost each year due to malnutrition, diarrhea and
malaria
* Kofi Annan: "Climate change is not something waiting to happen"
LONDON, England (CNN) -- The first comprehensive report into the human
cost of climate change warns the world is in the throes of a "silent
crisis" that is killing 300,000 people each year.
Victims of flooding in India last year are ferried to safety by the
Indian Army in the northeastern state of Bihar.
More than 300 million people are already seriously affected by the
gradual warming of the earth and that number is set to double by 2030,
the report from the Global Humanitarian Forum warns.
"For the first time we are trying to get the world's attention to the
fact that climate change is not something waiting to happen. It is
impacting seriously the lives of many people around the world," the
forum's president, former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, told CNN.
Speaking to CNN's Becky Anderson in London on Friday, Annan said the
migration of people from newly uninhabitable areas presents a security
issue that needs to be addressed by the United Nations Security Council.
"This is one of the reasons why I've described climate change as all
encompassing," he told CNN. "This threat to our health, this threat to
food production, this threat to security. It raises political tensions,
it will have people on the move -- and they are on the move -- and many
more which will bring tensions."
The report, titled "Human Impact Report: Climate Change -- The Anatomy
of a Silent Crisis" comes just six months before the United Nations
Climate Conference in Copenhagen to forge a post-Kyoto climate agreement
for 2012 and beyond.
Annan called on Member States to reach a "global, effective, fair and
binding" outcome on climate change, as the report warned that the talks
could "well be the last chance for avoiding global catastrophe."
He told CNN: "The U.S. administration has joined the mainstream about
fighting climate change and that is a big step, and I hope that will
also put a new momentum into the negotiations."
The report's startling numbers are based on calculations by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the Earth's atmosphere
warmed by 0.74 degrees Celsius (1.33 degrees Fahrenheit) from 1906 to
2005, with much of that increase coming in recent decades. The panel
predicts that by 2100 temperatures will have increased a minimum of two
degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels
regardless of what's agreed in Copenhagen.
"No matter what," the report concludes, "the suffering documented in
this report is only the beginning." A rise of two degrees, it says,
"would be catastrophic."
Of the 300,000 lives being lost each year due to climate change, the
report finds nine out of 10 are related to "gradual environmental
degradation," and that deaths caused by climate-related malnutrition,
diarrhea and malaria outnumber direct fatalities from weather-related
disasters. Photo See photos of devastation around the world »
The vast majority of deaths -- 99 percent -- are in developing countries
which are estimated to have contributed less than one percent of the
world's total carbon emissions.
The report warns climate change threatens all eight of the Millennium
Development Goals-- a set of goals agreed on by leading nations in 2000
that aim to reduce extreme poverty by 2015. The goals include
eradicating hunger, reducing child mortality, and halting the spread of
diseases including HIV/AIDS and malaria.
Around 45 million of the 900 million people estimated to be chronically
hungry are suffering due to climate change, the report says. Within 20
years that number is expected to double. At the same time food
production is expected to fall, driving food prices up 20 percent.
The countries considered to be most vulnerable are those in the
semi-arid dry land belt that runs from the Sahara/Sahel to the Middle
East and Central Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia,
Latin America and parts of the U.S., small island states and the Arctic
region.
Australia is singled out as the developed country most vulnerable to the
direct impacts of climate change. Over the past 15 years, the
combination of rising temperature and lower rainfall has produced the
worst drought in the country's recorded history.
While developed countries -- including Australia -- have committed funds
to counter the impact of climate change, the Global Humanitarian Forum
says developing nations need a dramatic injection of funds -- up to 100
times more than is currently available to help them adapt to the changes.
The total economic cost of climate change each year is thought to be
$125 billion, although the Forum warns that figure may be too
conservative and doesn't take into account the impacts on "health, water
supply and other shocks."
While commissioned by the Global Humanitarian Forum, the report was
reviewed by a panel of experts, including Rajendra Pachauri of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeffrey Sachs of the
Earth Institute at Columbia University and Barbara Stocking of Oxfam.