7/27/07 Scott Baldauf, Christian Science Monitor, Climate change escalates Darfur crisis
Iriba, Chad - With Darfur refugee women waiting up to two days for their chance to fill buckets at a communal water point, it's only a matter of time before bickering turns into a full-fledged fight.
Study Sees Climate Change Impact on Alaska - New York Times
Many of Alaska's roads, runways, railroads and water and sewer systems will wear out more quickly and cost more to repair or replace because of climate change, according to a study released yesterday.
Higher temperatures, melting permafrost, a reduction in polar ice and increased flooding are expected to raise the repair and replacement cost of thousands of infrastructure projects as much as $6.1 billion for a total of nearly $40 billion -- about a 20 percent increase -- from now to 2030, according to the study, by the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
BBC NEWS | Africa | UN issues desertification warning
The study by the United Nations University suggests climate change is making desertification "the greatest environmental challenge of our times".
If action is not taken, the report warns that some 50 million people could be displaced within the next 10 years.
The study was produced by more than 200 experts from 25 countries.
TABOU, Jan 4 (IPS) - It has been three years since Brahima Ouédraogo, a small-scale farmer from Burkina Faso, arrived in a little village in the Tabou region of south-western Côte d'Ivoire with his family, in search of arable land.
Initially residents of Klotou gave the newcomers a warm welcome. But, this warmth has since died away; in fact, some would even like to see the Ouédraogo family leave.By the end of tomorrow the average Briton will have caused as much global warning as the typical Kenyan will over the whole of this year, according to a report.
The findings highlight the glaring imbalance between the rich countries that produce most of the pollution and the poor countries that suffer the consequences in the forms of drought, floods, starvation and disease.
The World Development Movement (WDM), a poverty campaign group, has drawn up a "climate calendar" showing the dates when the UK will have emitted as much CO2 gas as other countries will in a year.
Unsurprisingly, the poorest counties such as Chad, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo produce virtually no carbon emissions. Even populous countries such as India will be overtaken in its emissions by the UK in a month's time. In fact, 164 countries in the world have a smaller carbon foootprint than the UK, while just 20, mainly including the major oil producers as well as the US, have a larger one.
By the end of tomorrow the average Briton will have produced 0.26 tonnes of CO2 emissions.
The Geneva-based organisation says there are now about 150 million migrants worldwide - just under 3% of the world population. That is 30 million more than 10 years ago.
Sunday 18 March 2007
Sheikh Alauddin, like hundreds of other residents living on West Bengal's Moushuni island, has never heard the term "global warming." But he is living with its consequences.
"At night we just pray to God, and hope the sea does not drown us," the 60-year-old told Reuters in Poilagheri village on the sparsely-populated island, part of the Sunderbans national park and the world's largest mangrove forest.
HOBART (Australia) - Rising sea levels and melting polar ice-sheets are at upper limits of projections, leaving some human population centers already unable to cope, top world scientists say as they analyze latest satellite data.
A United Nations report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in February projected sea level gains of 18-59 centimeters (7-23 inches) this century from temperature rises of 1.8-4.0 Celsius (3.2-7.8 Farenheit).Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.
As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.
If sea water level rises at present pace...
An annual 3.14
mm rise in sea level at Sunderbans due to climate change is eating away
12 islands on the delta, says a study by a group of scientists from
Jadavpur University.
The review says around 70,000 residents of Sunderban delta may turn into "environmental refugees" in the next 14 years unless the government initiates counter measures right away.
The findings, carried out by a team of scientists from Jadavpur University's School of Oceanographic Studies, are part of a vulnerability assessment project.
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| Losing ground:Land area in the Sundarbans islands is shrinking. |
They saw the shore pushing in closer every day. Yet, Shamila and her mother never thought the sea would completely devour their tiny island of Lohachara in the Sundarbans. And then one day, it did. The family of four was forced to pack its modest belongings and head for Sagar, the largest island in west Sundarbans. In the late 1990s, more such families followed suit.
"There's nothing any more where our island once was. It's just a huge stretch of sea where vessels ply," says Shamila's father Seikh Abdullah, among the first batch of envirogees (environment refugees) who have now settled in Sagar. Nearly 7,000 of his former island mates are his neighbours again.
Notorious for its annual floods, Bangladesh may seem the last place in the world to worry about a drying up of the rivers that flow from the Himalayas. But the country is as much at risk from drought as it is from flooding. Already farmers who used to grow rice have turned to farming prawns because the water in their fields has turned so salty nothing will grow there.
Bangladesh
is the front line of global warming, with rivers drying up, and
increasingly common freak weather conditions that include out-of-season
tornadoes and tides that have stopped changing. The entire country is
one huge delta, formed by the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers.
Flooding may seem to be Bangladesh's greatest enemy, but in fact the
rivers are its lifeline. They are the main source of fresh water for a
country where agriculture represents 21 per cent of the economy. And
environmentalists fear that if the Himalayan glaciers melt, the rivers'
flow will reduce drastically.
Most people tend to think the main risk in Bangladesh is a catastrophic flood from rising sea levels. But the country has a defense against that: a series of dikes along the coast which should be able to withstand predicted rises in the sea level. There is no defense against drought.
Professor Ainun Nishat, one of the country's leading climate experts, says it is the melting of the Himalayan glaciers that worries him most - more than rising sea levels or changing local weather patterns. "At the moment, we're probably seeing a slight increase in the river flow because of [the glaciers melting]," he says. "But what happens in two to five years when the glaciers are gone?"
The north-west faced an unprecedented drought last year, after the annual monsoon rains failed completely. Farmers had to resort to pumping ground water to survive, but they fear the ground water will dry up if the rains fail again.
Scores of countries face war for scarce land, food and water as global warming increases. This is the conclusion of the most devastating report yet on the effects of climate change that scientists and governments prepare to issue this week.
More than 60 nations, mainly in the Third World, will have existing tensions hugely exacerbated by the struggle for ever-scarcer resources. Others now at peace - including China, the United States and even parts of Europe - are expected to be plunged into conflict. Even those not directly affected will be threatened by a flood of hundreds of millions of "environmental refugees".
A woman harvesting corn in Malawi, an African country that is already
prone to drought and faces grim prospects under global warming.
Andrew Revkin 4/01/07
The world's richest countries, which have contributed by far the most to the atmospheric changes linked to global warming, are already spending billions of dollars to limit their own risks from its worst consequences, like drought and rising seas.
OSLO (Reuters) - Global warming could cause more hunger in Africa and melt most Himalayan glaciers by the 2030s, according to a draft U.N. report due on Friday which also warns that the poorest nations are likely to suffer most.
The U.N. climate panel, giving the most authoritative study on the regional impact of climate change since 2001, also predicts more heatwaves in countries such as the United States, and damages corals including Australia's Great Barrier Reef.
WASHINGTON-A key element of the second major report on climate change being released Friday in Belgium is a chart that maps out the effects of global warming, most of them bad, with every degree of temperature rise.There's one bright spot: A minimal heat rise means more food production in northern regions of the world.
Over the last few decades, as scientists have intensified their study of the human effects on climate and of the effects of climate change on humans, a common theme has emerged: in both respects, the world is a very unequal place.
In almost every instance, the people most at risk from climate change live in countries that have contributed the least to the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases linked to the recent warming of the planet.
A landscape of Ghoramara Island, seen during low tide, on the sea side of an embankment that is all that stands between the residents and the rising waters that threaten their homes.
OSLO - Droughts, floods and
rising seas linked to global warming could spur conflicts in coming
decades, experts said on Monday, the eve of a first U.N. Security
Council debate on climate change.And the poor in tropical regions of
Africa and Asia are likely to suffer most, perhaps creating tensions
with rich nations in the temperate north which are likely to escape the
worst effects of warming widely blamed on use of fossil fuels. 
"Global warming increases the potential for conflict," said Janos Bogardi, head of the U.N. University's Institute for Environment and Human Security in Bonn.
"The most imminent effect is probably desertification and land degradation," he told Reuters. His group has projected that climate change might force hundreds of millions of people from their homes in the long term.
Bogardi said the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan, where 200,000 people have died, was "probably the most prominent example" of a conflict partly caused by land degradation.
In the longer term, rising seas caused by melting icecaps and glaciers could swamp large tracts of countries such as Bangladesh, forcing millions to migrate and raising the chances of conflicts over shrinking land.
Shamola Begum will never forget the way her son cried in the last days of his life. Nine-year-old Masuk had always been a sickly child, but before he died he'd pleaded: "Mother, I need food." But Shamola often only had a little rice to feed him; nothing more.
For years, the debate over global warming has focused on the three big "E's": environment, energy, and economic impact. This week it officially entered the realm of national security threats and avoiding wars as well.
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"We believe that forced migration is now the most urgent threat facing poor people in the developing world," said John Davison, the lead author of the "Human Tide: the real migration crisis" report. "We estimate that over the years between now and 2050, a total of one billion people will be displaced from their homes." Scientists predict that average temperatures will rise by between 1.8 and 3.0 degrees Celsius this century because of greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, causing floods and famines and putting million of lives at risk. "The impact of climate change is the great," said the report. |
NEWTOK, Alaska -- The sturdy little Cessnas land whenever the fog lifts, delivering children's bicycles, boxes of bullets, outboard motors and cans of dried oats. And then, with a rumble down a gravel strip, the planes are gone, the outside world recedes and this subarctic outpost steels itself once again to face the frontier of climate change.
Global Warming to Multiply World's Refugee Burden - CommonDreams.org
BEIRUT - If rising sea levels force the people of the Maldive Islands to seek new homes, who will look after them in a world already turning warier of refugees?
Global warming's huddled masses
Robert McLeman, November 23, 2006
Canada has an obligation to help developing countries deal with a future in which hundreds of millions are on the move, many of whom will arrive on our doorstep
Last month the British government released a detailed and pessimistic report about the future impacts of climate change. One of the more worrying statements was that rising sea levels, floods and drought could displace more than 200 million people worldwide within the next 50 years.
Thirstier World Likely to See More Violence - UN Security Council - Global Policy Forum
By Stephen Leahy Inter Press Service
March 16, 2007
A strong link between droughts and violent civil conflicts in the developing world bodes ill for an increasingly thirsty world, say scientists, who warn that drought-related conflicts are expected to multiply with advancing climate change. "Severe, prolonged droughts are the strongest indicator of high-intensity conflicts," said Marc Levy of the Centre for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University's Earth Institute in New York. These are internal conflicts, not between countries, and involving more than 1,000 battle deaths, Levy said at a press briefing in Washington last week. Such conflicts tend to occur about a year after a "severe deviation in rainfall patterns", he said. Levy and colleagues used decades of detailed precipitation records, geospatial conflict information and other data in a complex computer model that overlays all this onto a fine-scale map of the world. "Major deviations from normal rainfall patterns were the strongest predictor of conflicts," he said. "I was surprised at how strong the correlation is."
Drought and advancing desert blamed for tensions
Chad and southern Africa also at risk from warming
Julian Borger, diplomatic editor
Saturday June 23, 2007
The Guardian
The conflict in Darfur has been driven by climate change and environmental degradation, which threaten to trigger a succession of new wars across Africa unless more is done to contain the damage, according to a UN report published yesterday.
"Darfur ... holds grim lessons for other countries at risk," an 18-month study of Sudan by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) concludes.
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