The Anatomy of A Silent Crisis The Anatomy of A Silent Crisis

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12 Forum 2009: Climate Change – The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis In its Fourth Assessment Report, the IPCC found that weather patterns have become more extreme, with more frequent and more intense rainfall events and more intense heat waves and prolonged droughts. The rhythm of weather has also become more unpredictable with changes in the timing and location of rainfall. 15,16 In addition to the increased severity of weather events, the sheer number of weather-related disasters (storms, hurricanes, floods, heat waves, droughts) has more than doubled over the last 20 years. 17 Today, the world experiences over 400 weather-related disasters per year. They leave a frightening toll in their wake: almost 90 million people requiring immediate assistance due to personal injury, property loss, exposure to epidemics, disease or shortages of food and fresh water. 18 The main gradual changes are rising earth surface temperatures, rising sea levels, desertification, changes in local rainfall and river run-off patterns with increased precipitation in high latitudes and decreased precipitation in sub-tropical latitudes, salinisation of river deltas, accelerated species extinction rates, loss of biodiversity and a weakening of ecosystems. The impact of this gradual change is considerable. It reduces access to fresh and safe drinking water, negatively affects health and poses a real threat to food security in many countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In some areas where employment and crop choices are limited, decreasing crop yields have led to famines. Desertification and other forms of land degradation have led to migration. Furthermore, the rise in sea levels has already spurred the first permanent displacement of small island inhabitants in the Pacific, i.e. Kiribati and Tuvalu. 19 Gradual environmental degradation due to climate change has also affected long-term water quality and quantity in some parts of the world, and triggered increases in hunger, insect-borne diseases such as malaria, other health problems such as diarrhoea and respiratory illnesses. It is a contributing factor to poverty, and forces people from their homes, sometimes permanently. Intuitively, if someone is affected by water scarcity, poverty or displacement, this also translates into health outcomes and food insecurity. Typically, climate change today mostly affects areas already seriously suffering under the above mentioned factors. Likewise, health outcomes and food insecurity lead to displacement and poverty which might result in competition for scarce resources and strains on mostly already limited government capacity to deal with deteriorating conditions and might ultimately lead to conflict. Therefore health outcomes and food security are taken as the basis for all climate change related impacts. Using this approach, the update of WHO Global Burden of Disease study shows that long term consequences of climate change affect over 235 million people 20 today. 4,21 Those seriously affected by climate change are expected to more than double within 20 years, and lives lost every year are expected to increase by at least two thirds 22 The same calculation as above is used to project past weather disaster trends into the future. 23 Projecting past trends into the future assumes a constant number of people seriously affected or dying per disaster — i.e. factors such as population growth are not taken into account. By the year 2030, the lives of 660 million people are expected to be seriously affected, either by natural disasters caused climate change or through gradual environmental degradation. 24 This is,
The human impact of climate change – Already serious today 13 as an example, almost twice the number of people expected to suffer from diabetes in 2030. 25 And while experts today worry about a projected explosion of diabetes cases by more than 50 percent over next 20 years, there is little awareness that the number of people seriously affected by climate change actually is expected to increase at double that rate. The number of deaths from weather-related disasters and gradual environmental degradation due to climate change is expected to jump to about 500,000 people per year. 26 This is about equal to those who annually die of breast cancer, which has the fifth largest mortality rate among cancers and is the number one leading cause of cancer deaths among women. 27 The underlying assumption is that population growth and continuous efforts to alleviate the burden on health and livelihoods will cancel each other out. The outlook for the future is not encouraging, with more frequent, more severe and more prolonged weather-related disasters on the horizon. Linear projections suggest that by 2030, the number of weather-related disasters recorded in a single year will be approximately three times higher than the average occurrence rate during the 1975-2008 time span. 28 This is suggested in a 2008 report on the Humanitarian Consequences of climate change by the Feinstein Center. If these projections prove correct, weather-related disasters due to climate change could affect about 350 million. 29
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Climate change is here. It has a hu
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The Anatomy of A Silent Crisis The Anatomy of A Silent Crisis

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