The post India among four South Asian countries where children are most at risk of the impacts of climate change appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>”The Climate Crisis Is a Child Rights Crisis: Introducing the Children’s Climate Risk Index” (CCRI) is UNICEF’s first focussed on children. It ranks countries based on children’s exposure to climate and environmental shocks such as cyclones and heatwaves, as well as their vulnerability to those shocks based on their access to essential services.
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and India are among four South Asian countries where children are at extremely high risk of the impacts of the climate crisis, with a ranking of 14th, 15th, 25th and 26th respectively.
CCRI has placed India as one of the 33 extremely high-risk countries with flooding and air pollution being the repeated environmental shocks leading to socio-economic adverse consequences for women and children.
Approximately 1 billion children live in one of the 33 countries classified as “extremely high-risk”, including the four South Asian countries.
It is estimated that more than 600 million Indians will face ”acute water shortages” in the coming years, while at the same time flash flooding is to increase significantly in the majority of India’s urban areas once the global temperature increase rises above 2 degree Celsius. Twenty-one of the world’s 30 cities with the most polluted air in 2020 were in India.
Dr Yasmin Ali Haque, UNICEF India Representative, said, “Climate change is a child rights crisis. The Children’s Climate Change Index data has pointed to the serious deprivations faced by children due to the intensifying effect that climate and environmental shocks have on existing inadequate access to essential services such as water and sanitation, healthcare and education.”
“Understanding where and how children are uniquely vulnerable to this crisis is crucial to building our resilience and effectively addressing climate change. UNICEF hopes the findings of the report will help prioritize action to protect those most at risk and to ensure that children inherit a livable planet.”
India’s neighbours Nepal is ranked 51st and Sri Lanka 61st. Bhutan is ranked 111th, with children at relatively lower risk.
For the first time, we have clear evidence of the impact of climate change on millions of children in South Asia. Droughts, floods, air pollution and river erosion across the region have left millions of children homeless and hungry, and without any healthcare and water,” said George Laryea-Adjei, UNICEF Regional Director for South Asia.
“Together, climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic have created an alarming crisis for South Asian children. The time to act is now – if we invest in water, healthcare and education, we can protect their futures from the impacts of a changing climate and degrading environment,” Laryea-Adjei said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Edge Media staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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]]>The post Extreme heat waves are now expected to happen once per decade : UN climate science report appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>The report found that we are already experiencing those effects of climate change, as the planet has surpassed more than 1 degree Celsius in average warming. Heat waves, droughts and torrential rains are only set to become more frequent and extreme as the earth warms further.
It is the first time that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has quantified the likelihood of these extreme events in a wide variety of scenarios.
The report found that once-in-a-decade heavy rain events are now 1.3 times more likely and 6.7% wetter, compared with the 50 years up to 1900 when major human-driven warming started to occur.
Previously once-in-a-decade droughts could happen every five or six years.
Scientists emphasized that these effects of climate change are already here, with events like the heat wave in the U.S. Pacific Northwest killing hundreds in June and Brazil currently experiencing its worst drought in 91 years.
“The heat wave in Canada, fires in California, floods in Germany, floods in China, droughts in central Brazil make it very, very clear that climate extremes are having a very heavy toll,” said Paulo Artaxo, a lead author of the report and an environmental physicist and the University of Sao Paulo.
The future looks even grimmer, with more warming meaning more frequent extreme events.
Heat waves show stronger increases in frequency with warming than all other extreme events. Twice in a century heat waves could happen roughly every six years with 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, a level which the report says could be surpassed within two decades.
Should the world become 4 degrees Celsius hotter, as could happen in a high-emissions scenario, those heat waves would happen every one to two years.
Carolina Vera, another report author and a physical climate scientist at University of Buenos Aires and Argentina’s main agency for science research (CONICET), said there is also an increasing likelihood that multiple extreme weather events could happen at the same time.
For example, extreme heat, drought and high winds – conditions that could feed wildfires – are more likely to happen at the same time.
The IPCC has a medium or high-level confidence that many important agricultural regions around the world will see more droughts or extreme rain. That includes parts of Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil that are major growers of soybeans and other global commodities.
“It is scary, sure, with the risk that fires, heat waves, droughts will affect humans in the form of weather and food insecurity, energy insecurity, water quality and health – mainly in poor regions,” said Jose Marengo, a climatologist at the Brazilian Science Ministry’s disaster monitoring center.
Marengo was not involved in the IPCC report.
For example, regions that are already prone to drought are likely to experience them more frequently, including in the Mediterranean, southern Australia, and western North America, said Friederike Otto, IPCC author and climatologist at University of Oxford.
Increased frequency of drought and heavy rain also are not mutually exclusive and are predicted in places like Southern Africa, she said.
The projections on extreme weather events laid out in the report reinforce the importance of curbing climate change to the levels laid out in the Paris Agreement, scientists said.
“If we stabilize at 1.5 degrees, we can stop them from getting much worse,” Otto said.
(This story has not been edited by The Edge Media staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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]]>The post Irreversible impact of climate change to hit India in recent years appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>Most of these impacts are irreversible and hence cannot be remediated even if greenhouse gas emissions decline dramatically, the IPCC said.
The IPCC report titled ‘Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis’ released on Monday said heatwaves and humid heat stress will be more intense and frequent during the 21st century over South Asia.
The Indian Ocean, which includes the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal, has warmed faster than the global average, the IPCC said with “very high confidence”. The oceans factsheet released by IPCC on Monday indicates that sea surface temperature over Indian ocean is likely to increase by 1 to 2 degrees C (°C) when there is 1.5°C to 2°C global warming.
Over high mountains in Asia which include the Himalayas, snow cover has reduced since the early 21st century, and glaciers have thinned, retreated, and lost mass since the 1970s, the IPCC said, although the Karakoram glaciers haven’t recorded any major retreating trend.
Snow-covered areas and snow volumes will continue to decrease during the 21st century, snowline elevations will rise and glacier mass is likely to decline further as emissions rise. Rising global temperature and rain can increase the occurrence of glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) and landslides over moraine-dammed lakes, the IPCC warned.
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]]>The post Upcoming UN report gives clear warning about the dangers of accelerating climate change appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>The chief for the November summit due to be held in the Scottish city of Glasgow told the Observer newspaper a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) due on Monday would show the world was on the brink of potential disaster.
“This is going to be the starkest warning yet that human behaviour is alarmingly accelerating global warming and this is why COP26 has to be the moment we get this right,” Sharma said.
We can’t afford to wait two years, five years, 10 years-this is the moment,” he added, explaining that unless nations “act now, we will unfortunately be out of time”.
Sharma was forced to defend British fossil-fuel projects that include plans to license new oil and gas fields in the North Sea, which have proven embarrassing for Britain as it seeks to galvanise international action on climate change.
The Paris-based watchdog, the International Energy Agency (IAE), has warned all fossil fuel development and exploration must cease this year if the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees celsius is to be met.
“Future (fossil fuel) licences are going to have to adhere to the fact we have committed to go to net zero by 2050 in legislation,” the COP26 president said.
“There will be a climate check on any licences,” he added.
A series of catastrophic emergencies in recent weeks including floods in Europe and China, record temperatures in North America and forest fires around the world have focused minds on global warming, Sharma said.
“We’re seeing the impacts across the world,” Sharma said. “Every day you will see a new high being recorded in one way or another across the world,” he added.
Sharma said he was “throwing the kitchen sink” at efforts to reach a deal on the contentious target to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, holding a large number of virtual and in-person meetings as he looks to bring 197 countries together in consensus on the aim.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Edge Media staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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]]>The post Countries need to be more ambitious to tame climate change : UN climate chief appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>Only just over half of countries that are party to the accord have submitted updated proposals for limiting their carbon emissions, Patricia Espinosa said in a statement.
And “the level of ambition reflected in those national climate action plans also needs to be enhanced,” she said
The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty on climate change that was adopted by 196 countries in December 2015 with the aim of limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius and preferably to 1.5C, compared to pre-industrial levels.
Under the accord, every participating country originally had until the end of 2020 to submit new or updated “nationally determined contributions” or “NDCs”.
But because of the global coronavirus pandemic and the postponement of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow to November 2021, a number of governments said they would be unable to meet the deadline.
By the new cut-off date on Friday, “the secretariat (had) received new or updated NDCs from 110 parties,” Espinosa said, including the United States, which came back into the Paris Agreement after former president Donald Trump pulled out.
“This compares favourably with new or updated NDCs from 75 parties received up to the end of December 2020… but it is still far from satisfactory, since only a little over half the Parties (54 percent) have met the cut-off deadline.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has indicated that by the end of this decade, emissions must have been reduced by at least 45 percent compared to 2010 levels
Recent extreme heat waves, droughts and floods across the globe are a dire warning that much more needs to be done, and much more quickly, to change our current pathway. This can only be achieved through more ambitious NDCs,” Espinosa said.
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]]>The post Climate change is causing destruction all over the world appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>In the past week alone, 380,000 people have been evacuated due to floods in China’s Henan province, 30 villages in Uganda were affected as rivers overflowed and 25 people died in landslides after Mumbai was hit by big storms that also inundated regions surrounding the megacity. Temperatures in Turkey and North Africa approached 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit), while South Africa and Brazil froze. Siberia is battling wildfires again.
Finland experienced 31 consecutive days with maximum temperatures above 25 degrees Celsius, the longest heatwave ever recorded in the country. Emergency rooms filled up, mostly with people suffering from dehydration and cardiac issues, local media reported.
“Research shows that similar long heatwaves can lead to several hundreds of excess deaths, mostly among the elderly,” said Virpi Kollanus, a researcher at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare. A 2018 heatwave is estimated to have caused about 380 deaths in Finland.
In Iran, the hottest summer in decades has led to water shortages that in turn sparked protests in the country’s southwest. At least one protester has been killed by gunfire and a policeman was shot dead during the unrest.
All these calamities are part of a constellation of extreme weather events that paint a picture of a world that’s already warmed 1.2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial times. There’s no doubt it will get warmer.
The global climate is out of balance, German meteorologist Johannes Quaas said in an interview last week as his country reeled from floods that killed over 170 people and left hundreds missing. Our climate’s reaction to greenhouse gas emissions isn’t immediate. The warming and resulting weather events that we see today are a reaction to emissions that entered the atmosphere decades ago.
“Even if societies meet the target to reduce carbon dioxide pollution to net zero in 2050, the planet will continue to warm after that,” Quaas said. “The planet needs to reach a new balance and will continue to warm until it does.”
Scientists estimate that, even if we meet global emissions reduction goals, some amount of warming is baked in. That will take the planet to somewhere between 1.5 degrees Celsius to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times by the end of the century. While their warming predictions have been correct in the past, there’s no way to be absolutely sure when temperatures will stop rising, because the experiment we’re running on the planet has never been attempted before.
“We’ll definitely make it to 1.5 degrees Celsius and it will be hard to stop the warming and remain there,” said Hans-Otto Portner, a professor at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research and an adviser to the German government on climate and the environment. “This tells us that we haven’t reached the end of it. The motivation to do something about climate change only grows because we see the signs on the wall.”
Death, violence and destruction are all signs of humanity’s struggle to adapt to a changing climate. “It seems like there’s something in human mentality that makes us be behind the events, and not ahead,” Portner said. “Maybe that’s because the nature of unprecedented events is that we can’t imagine what’s coming.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Edge Media staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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]]>The post Prime Minister Narendra Modi is taking a lead role by launching several schemes : Amit Shah on global warming issue appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>“Global warming and climate change has become a crisis and in the fight against it, PM Modi is taking a lead role by launching several schemes by distributing free gas supply to decrease the carbon footprint. PM Modi is serious against this global crisis and has been taking all measures to mitigate the problem,” said Mr Shah, speaking at the lunch of Green Sohra plantation drive by Assam Rifles in Meghalaya.
He further added, “Earlier, we have studied in text books that Cherrapunji get the highest rainfall in the country but now a few kilometre away there is a place where highest rainfall was recorded. Due to cutting of trees such a thing occurred. We have to take oath that again we will transform Cherrapunji into highest rainfall centre in India. Our paramilitary forces have started the plantation drive to create a green environment and Assam Rifles has taken the lead in the plantation programme by planting 1.48 lakh saplings in Meghalaya area.”
Elaborating on the government plans, Mr Shah said a 100 hectare area in Meghalaya has been identified and ₹ 50 crore will be spent for planting various saplings. “We have taken a target to plant 1 million saplings in 1,000 hectare area of Meghalaya within three years and the Assam Rifles will take the lead,” he said.
He continued, “If we can successfully do the plantation programme and nurture the saplings to grow into a tree then again Cherrapunji will transform into highest rainfall centre in India by regaining the lost glory.”
The Minister underlined the role of community participation to help the endeavour.
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]]>The post Angela Merkel stresses on the need to “speed up” the fight against climate change appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>Merkel, who is retiring after September elections, said that Germany and other countries had “not done enough” to meet the goal set out in the Paris climate accord of capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius.
“We shouldn’t pretend that we haven’t done anything, but it’s true that not enough has been done to reach the aim of staying well under two degrees and as close to 1.5 degrees as possible,” Merkel told reporters.
That is not just true of Germany, but of many countries across the world, which is why we need to increase the tempo.”
Merkel had already called for faster climate action last Sunday as she visited flood victims in Rhineland-Palatinate state.
One of the regions worst hit by last week’s devastating floods, Rhineland-Palatinate said Thursday that its death count had reached 128, taking the total count to 177 in Germany and 209 across Europe.
Merkel’s cabinet approved a huge emergency aid package Wednesday for flood-stricken regions, unlocking some 400 million euros ($470 million) in immediate relief.
We have also made clear that this sum will be increased if it proves not to be enough,” Merkel said Thursday.
She added that society faced a “profound transformation” as European governments looked to reach carbon neutrality in the coming decades.
Merkel, who will leave office after 16 years following the September 26 poll, defended her record on the environment.
She pointed to new emissions reductions targets agreed by her government earlier this year, which mean Germany now aims to reach carbon neutrality by 2045, five years earlier than the previous target.
The move came after Germany’s highest court demanded the government revise its targets, which it said were not ambitious enough.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Edge Media staff and is published from a syndicated feed)
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]]>The post Moscow and Washington have a shared interest in battling climate change, says Putin appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>The climate problem is one of the areas where Russia and the United States have common interests and similar approaches,” Putin said in a phone call with Kerry who is visiting Moscow, the Kremlin said in a statement.
The former secretary of state is in Russia this week to discuss climate change with officials and has called on the country to cooperate with the US on the issue.
Putin said Moscow “attaches great importance” to achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement and “advocates de-politicising” dialogue on climate change.
The comments on a rare point of cooperation between the two countries come after Putin met US President Joe Biden for talks in Geneva last month.
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