Millions to go hungry, waterless: climate report
Pastor Dale Morgan
Millions to go hungry, waterless: climate report*
By Rob Taylor
Reuters
Monday, January 29, 2007; 10:05 PM
CANBERRA (Reuters) - Rising temperatures will leave millions more people
hungry by 2080 and cause critical water shortages in China and
Australia, as well as parts of Europe and the United States, according
to a new global climate report.
By the end of the century, climate change will bring water scarcity to
between 1.1 and 3.2 billion people as temperatures rise by 2 to 3
Celsius (3.6 to 4.8 Fahrenheit), a leaked draft of an Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report said.
The report, due for release in April but detailed in The Age newspaper,
said an additional 200 million to 600 million people across the world
would face food shortages in another 70 years, while coastal flooding
would hit another 7 million homes.
"The message is that every region of the earth will have exposure," Dr
Graeme Pearman, who helped draft the report, told Reuters on Tuesday.
"If you look at China, like Australia they will lose significant
rainfall in their agricultural areas," said Pearman, the former climate
director of Australia's top science body, the Commonwealth Scientific
and Industrial Research Organization.
Africa and poor countries such as Bangladesh would be most affected
because they were least able to cope with greater coastal damage and
drought, said Pearman.
The IPCC was set up in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and
the U.N. Environment Program to guide policy makers globally on the
impact of climate change.
The panel is to release a report on Friday in Paris forecasting global
temperatures rising by 2 to 4.5 Celsius (3.6 to 8.1 Fahrenheit) above
pre-industrial levels by 2100, with a "best estimate" of a 3C (5.4 F) rise.
That report will summarize the scientific basis of climate change, while
the April draft details the consequences of global warming and options
for adapting to them.
The draft contains an entire chapter on Australia -- which is in the
grip of its worst recorded drought -- warning the country's Great
Barrier Reef would become "functionally extinct" because of coral bleaching.
As well, snow would disappear from Australia's southeast alps, while
water inflows to the Murray-Darling river basin, the country's main
agricultural region, would fall by 10 and 25 percent by 2050.
In Europe, glaciers would disappear from the central Alps, while some
Pacific island nations would be hit hard by rising sea levels and more
frequent tropical storms.
"It's really a story of trying to assess in your own region what your
exposure will be, and making sure you have ways to deal with it," said
Pearman.
On the positive side, Pearman said there was an enormous amount the
international community could do to avert climate change if swift action
was taken.
"The projections in the report that comes out this week are based on the
assumption that we are slow to respond and that things continue
more-or-less as they have in the past."
Some scientists say Australia -- the world's driest inhabited continent
-- is suffering from "accelerated climate change" compared to other
nations.