Warming report warns of poverty and war
Starvation, poverty, flooding, droughts, war and disease are likely to worsen as the world warms from man-made climate change, a leaked draft of an international scientific report says.
The Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will issue a report next March on how global warming is already affecting the way people live and what will happen in the future, including a worldwide drop in income.
A leaked copy of a draft of the summary of the report appeared online on Friday on a climate skeptic's website. Governments will spend the next few months making comments about the draft.
"We've seen a lot of impacts and they've had consequences," Carnegie Institution climate scientist Chris Field, who heads the report, told The Associated Press on Saturday.
"And we will see more in the future."
Cities, where most of the world now lives, have the highest vulnerability, as do the globe's poorest people.
"Throughout the 21st century, climate change impacts will slow down economic growth and poverty reduction, further erode food security and trigger new poverty traps, the latter particularly in urban areas and emerging hotspots of hunger," the report says.
"Climate change will exacerbate poverty in low and lower-middle income countries and create new poverty pockets in upper-middle to high-income countries with increasing inequality."
For people living in poverty, the report says, "climate-related hazards constitute an additional burden."
The report says scientists have high confidence especially in what it calls certain "key risks".
They include people dying from warming and sea rise-related flooding, famine because of temperature and rain changes, farmers going broke because of lack of water, dangerous and deadly heat waves worsening and land and marine ecosystems failing.
None of the harms talked about in the 29-page summary is solely due to global warming, the scientists say. But a warmer world, with bursts of heavy rain and prolonged drought, will worsen some of these existing effects, they say.
If emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of coal, oil and gas continue at current trajectories, "the combination of high temperature and humidity in some areas for parts of the year will compromise normal human activities including growing food or working outdoors," the report says.
One of the more controversial sections of the report involves climate change and war.
"Climate change indirectly increases risks from violent conflict in the form of civil war, inter-group violence and violent protests by exacerbating well-established drivers of these conflicts such as poverty and economic shocks," the report says.
The summary says that for North America, the highest risks over the long term are from wildfires, heat waves and flooding.
Water - too much and too little - and heat are the biggest risks for Europe, South America and Asia, with South America and Asia having to deal with drought-related food shortages.
Africa gets those risks and more: starvation, pests and disease.
Australia and New Zealand get the unique risk of losing their marine reef ecosystems, and small island nations have to be worried about being inundated by rising seas.
