Climate change discriminates against those least able to combat it

During the heat wave across much of Australia last summer retailers reported a frantic run on air-conditioners. During the recent weeks of extreme heat across the isolated border region of Kenya and Somalia, aid agencies reported entire communities of nomadic herders walking out of the withered acacia scrub, much of their livestock having perished on the way.

Climate change is a global issue and weather extremes put everyone at risk; the deadly bushfires sparked by last year's heatwave in Victoria made that tragically clear.

But climate change discriminates in two ways. Although industrial economies emit two-thirds of the world's greenhouse gases, extreme weather events and rising sea levels will disproportionately hit the world's poor, the very communities that are also least equipped to "adapt".

While one in two Australians now owns at least one air-conditioner, up more than 80 per cent in a decade, and city water supplies are being backed up with desalination plants, a decade of severe drought in Kenya has reduced self-sufficient herders to beggars huddled around plastic water tanks trucked in by government officials and relief workers.

The World Development Report 2010: Development and Climate Change, released in advance of this December's global talks in Copenhagen, estimates poor nations will bear between 75 and 80 per cent of the cost of floods, increased desertification and other disasters with countries in Africa and South Asia expected to lose up to 5 per cent of GDP. By 2020, between 75 and 250 million people will be exposed to increased water stress. Consider the impact in Africa alone, where rain-fed agriculture employs 70 per cent of the population.

via smh.com.au

Posted via web from Global Warming News