Phl, nine other developing countries most vulnerable to climate change

MANILA, Philippines - The world’s temperature will heat up by another four degrees before the end of the century, and along the way bring cataclysmic changes including extreme heat-waves, declining global food stocks, massive devastating floods, and a sea level rise affecting hundreds of millions of people.

According to a World Bank-commissioned scientific report released recently, all regions of the world would suffer and  the poor countries would  suffer the most.

It cited the Philippines, along with nine other developing countries, as among the most vulnerable to sea level rise resulting among others to massive and destructive floods.

The developing countries – the poor ones in particular – are most vulnerable as it does not have the resources and the ability to prepare or to recover from the devastating effects of climate change.

As global or domestic food stock decline, the poorer or developing countries will be at the shorter end of the rope.

Meanwhile, “Turn Down the Heat”, the latest climate science prepared for the World Bank by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Climate Analytics, said that the world is on a path to a four degree Celsius (4°C) warmer world by end of this century and current greenhouse gas emissions pledges will not reduce this.

World Bank Group president Jim Yong Kim said that a four-degree warmer world could, and must be, avoided – by at least trying to hold warming below two degrees.

 “Lack of action on climate change threatens to make the world our children inherit a completely different world than we are living in today. Climate change is one of the single biggest challenges facing development, and we need to assume the moral responsibility to take action on behalf of future generations, especially the poorest,” Jim said.

The report said that no nation would be immune to the impacts of climate change. However, the distribution of impacts is likely to be inherently unequal and tilted against many of the world’s poorest regions  which have the least economic, institutional, scientific, and technical capacity to cope and adapt.

The World Bank group head said that the solutions don’t lie only in climate finance or climate projects.

“The solutions lie in effective risk management and ensuring all our work, all our thinking is designed with the threat of a 4°C world in mind,” he added.

The report further  said that the present carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration is higher.

Emissions are about 35,000 million metric tons per year and are projected to rise to 41,000 million metric tons of CO2 per year in 2020.

The study further indicated that the global mean temperature continued to increase and is now about 0.8 degrees above ore-industrial levels.

The global mean temperature increase approaches the difference between temperatures today and those of the last ice age when much of central Europe and the northern US were covered with kilometers of ice and global mean temperatures were about 4.5 degrees C to seven degrees C lower.

“And this magnitude of climate change  – human induced – is occurring over a century, not millennia,” it added.

A global warming of 0.8 degrees C may not seem large, but many climate change impacts have already started to emerge.

The 2010 heat wave in Russia killed 55,000, annual crop failure at about 25 percent, burned areas at more than one million hectares, and the economic losses at about $15 billion, or one percent of its gross domestic product (GDP).

The recent US drought affected about 80 percent of agricultural land, making it the most severe drought since the 1950s.

Climate change also sees the acidity levels of the ocean growing by 150 percent, said to be unequaled.

“Evidence is already emerging of the adverse consequences of acidification for marine organisms and ecosystems, combined with the effects of warming, over-fishing, and habitat destruction,’ the report added.

The World Bank-commissioned scientific report said that avoiding or reducing the pace of global warming could be avoided.

“The level of impacts that developing countries and the rest of the world experience will be a result of government, private sector, and civil society decisions and choices, including inaction,” it challenged.