“Climate change responsible for 300,000 deaths a year”
A new report from Global Humanitarian Forum is the first ever exclusively focused on the global human impact of climate change. It calculates that more than 300 million people are seriously affected by climate change at a total economic cost of $125 billion per year.
The new report “Human Impact Report: Climate Change – The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis” projects that by 2030, worldwide deaths will reach almost 500,000 per year, people affected by climate change annually expected to rise to over 600 million and the total annual economic cost increase to around $300 billion.
– Climate change is a silent human crisis. Yet it is the greatest emerging humanitarian challenge of our time. Already today, it causes suffering to hundreds of millions of people most of whom are not even aware that they are victims of climate change, comments Kofi A. Annan, President of the Global Humanitarian Forum, in a press release.
According to report findings, climate change adaptation efforts need to be scaled up by a factor of 100 in developing countries, which account for 99% of casualties due to climate change. The populations most gravely at risk are over half a billion people in some of the poorest areas that are also highly prone to climate change – in particular, the semi-arid dry land belt countries from the Sahara to the Middle East and Central Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, South and South East Asia, and small island developing states.
"We can no longer afford to ignore the human impacts of climate change" Long regarded as a distant future problem, climate change is already today a major constraint on human efforts all over the world. Consequently, when presenting the report Kofi Annan concluded that just six months before the Copenhagen summit, the world finds itself at a crossroads:
– We can no longer afford to ignore the human impact of climate change. Put simply, the report is a clarion call for negotiators at Copenhagen to come to the most ambitious international agreement ever negotiated, or continue to accept mass starvation, mass sickness and mass migration on an ever growing scale. Download the report here: http://www.ghfgeneva.org/Portals/0/pdfs/human_impact_report.pdf
