The climate change reports by the IPCC experts are made of three parts. After the release of the first part of the fourth report that was published in January, the second one is due for Friday. This section will be handling the “impacts, adaptation and vulnerability” due to climate change.
The experts will hence work on the consequences of global warming on water resources, on agriculture, on fishing or health related subjects. To the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change, a body of the UN) experts, if the global temperatures were to rise by 1.5 or 2.5 °C, 20 to 30 percent of fauna or flora species would be lead to extinction.
Tropical illnesses like malaria, diarrhoea or dengue would spread. Malaria already kills more than a million people per annum and 300 million people are suffering from this illness.
Furthermore, more and more people would suffer from malnutrition on a global level. It is estimated that currently 850 million people are already undernourished in the world (FAO estimate).
A novelty in this IPCC report is the adaptation that would be needed to face this phenomenon. Not so long ago, scientists thought that this would mainly concern developing countries, but now it also concerns rich countries.
As we saw in yesterday’s article, poor nations will suffer a lot from climate change, but it seems that countries from the North would also have to deal with major issues. Among these issues, the increased importance of extreme phenomena like droughts or floods.
It seems that developed countries are already thinking beyond Kyoto as it is now sure that it would only be just the first small step to mitigate climate change. As is, it would indeed be more that insufficient to mitigate climate change.
To infer this article, I would like to say that I will read the summary on Friday this new report and will publish my own short version as I did for the first part afterwards.
Source : Le Figaro