Climate change to claim 600,000 lives a year
Pastor Dale Morgan
Climate change to claim 600,000 lives a year
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From correspondents in London
Reuters
May 29, 2009 09:30am
CLIMATE change kills about 315,000 people a year through hunger,
sickness and weather disasters, and the annual death toll is expected to
rise to half a million by 2030.
A study commissioned by the Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum,
estimates that climate change seriously affects 325 million people every
year, a number that will more than double in 20 years to 10 per cent of
the world's population (now about 6.7 billion).
Economic losses due to global warming amount to over $125 billion ($160
billion) annually - more than the flow of aid from rich to poor nations
- and are expected to rise to $340 billion ($345 billion) each year by
2030, according to the report.
"Climate change is the greatest emerging humanitarian challenge of our
time, causing suffering to hundreds of millions of people worldwide,"
Kofi Annan, former UN secretary-general and GHF president, said.
"The first hit and worst affected are the world's poorest groups, and
yet they have done least to cause the problem."
The report says developing countries bear more than nine-tenths of the
human and economic burden of climate change, while the 50 poorest
countries contribute less than one percent of the carbon emissions that
are heating up the planet.
Mr Annan urged governments due to meet at UN talks in Copenhagen in
December to agree on an effective, fair and binding global pact to
succeed the Kyoto Protocol, the world's main mechanism for tackling
global warming.
"Copenhagen needs to be the most ambitious international agreement ever
negotiated," he wrote in an introduction to the report.
"The alternative is mass starvation, mass migration and mass sickness."
The study warns that the true human impact of global warming is likely
to be far more severe than it predicts, because it uses conservative UN
scenarios.
New scientific evidence points to greater and more rapid climate change.
The report calls for a particular focus on the 500 million people it
identifies as extremely vulnerable because they live in poor countries
most prone to droughts, floods, storms, sea-level rise and creeping deserts.
Africa is the region most at risk from climate change, home to 15 of the
20 most vulnerable countries, the report says.
Other areas also facing the highest level of threat include South Asia
and small island developing states.
To avoid the worst outcomes, the report says efforts to adapt to the
effects of climate change must be scaled up 100 times in developing
countries.
International funds pledged for this purpose amount to only $400 million
($510 miilion), compared with an average estimated cost of $32 billion
($40 billion) annually, it notes.