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19m Lankans face financial hit from climate change by 2050
Living standards in the Northern and North-Western provinces will be badly affected by changing climate and the economic engine of the Western Province will also falter, according to a World Bank study that links GDP to the impact of climate change.
Going in search of water: Women are more affected, but female-headed households are more resilient to impacts
The Jaffna and Puttalam districts will be the top hotspots – areas where changes in average weather will adversely affect living standards – while the second most populous district in the country, Gampaha, is among the top 10 most vulnerable districts.
Gampaha has been heavily affected by recent droughts, and the World Bank report points out that western Sri Lanka, along with south-eastern India, northern Pakistan and eastern Nepal, have experienced “unambiguous” temperature rises of 1C to 1.5C (1.8F to 2.7F) from 1950-2010.
The report, South Asia’s Hotspots: The Impact of Temperature and Precipitation Changes on Living Standards, combines average temperature and rainfall information with household survey data to recognise looming changes to the human condition.
Such changes inevitably affect the national economy. “In Sri Lanka, living standards could go down by around 5 percent, and in the worst-case scenario may decline by around 7 percent,” said Professor Muthukumara Mani, a leading economist in the World Bank South Asia Region and author of the report.
“Under the worst-case scenario, GDP will decline by 7.7 percent, an estimated loss of $US50 billion.”
According to the report, about 19 million people in Sri Lanka today live in locations that could become moderate or severe hotspots by 2050 under the carbon-intensive scenario. This is equivalent to more than 90 percent of the country’s population.
Stress was laid on the importance of coping with the changes of average temperature as much as the increase of severe weather events. “Global warming is proven, and the climate change is the ultimate threat multiplier. We are not doing enough, heading toward a 3C increase by 2100, and the poor will suffer most,” said Prof. Mohan Munasinghe, former vice chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“We also tend to forget long-term effects as more focus is on the short term. In case of extreme events, we at least know kind of action that can be taken such as relocation, evacuation etc. and can have a robust mechanism to deal with natural disasters. But we don’t know much about gradual changes in temperature and how to face them,” Prof. Munasinghe said.
“Even a change of one week or two weeks of monsoon can have an impact on farmers. We still do not know what to do with the gradual changes.”
On current trends, humans would need the resources of two planets to satisfy our needs by 2030, Prof. Munasinghe said, stressing the need to take a sustainable path.
People employed in agriculture will bear the brunt of climate-change-caused hardship and many will face extreme poverty, the report states.
They have already begun moving toward other day jobs as they cannot rely totally on agriculture, according to figures shown at the study’s launch ceremony.
While less developed and agriculture-based households are more prone to livelihood upset, hardship will not be limited to rural areas: in Pakistan, the most vulnerable exist in urban areas. The report also states that female-run households are more resilient.
Dr. Herath Manthrithilake, head of the International Water Management Institute (IMWI)’s country programme, said the highlight of the study is its linking of weather changes to the effects on GDP, which allows policymakers to easily understand the consequences of climate change.
Dr. Manthrithilake said water will be an important resource and we would not be able to look as lightly on water management as we did in the last century. “We need to think about all the water resources and how to use them constructively — how we can combine usage. At the moment, once we use water for agriculture, we discard it. We need to find out how waste water can be reused,” he said.
Kusum Athukorala of Netwater Partnership pointed out that women are foot soldiers of climate change adaptation. “Often, women looking for water in parched land has been the tell-tale picture of drought. So they are more affected, but female-headed households are more resilient to impacts,” Ms. Athukorala said.
Given that five of the top 10 vulnerable districts of Sri Lanka are in Northern Province – with Jaffna, Mannar and Kilinochchi the worst affected – it is important that changes in average temperature and precipitation be considered for planning and development activities in that province.
The urbanised west of the country will not escape a financial hit from climate change. The report states: “The highly-urbanised and densely-populated Western Province, which includes Colombo, is also predicted to experience a living standards decline of 7.5 percent by 2050, compared with a situation without changes in average weather. This is a substantial drop, with potentially large implications for the country, given that the province contributes more than 40 per cent of Sri Lanka’s GDP.”
The report states that as more people move from agricultural areas to urban areas to cope better with the economic effects of climate change these shifts will in turn create new climate impacts, particularly with risks to health.
The World Bank report suggests ways in which Sri Lanka could limit the problems caused by climate change. Increasing the share of the non-agricultural sector by a third could limit the deterioration in living standards from -7 percent to 0.1 percent. Reducing travel time to markets and increasing average educational levels would also help the country.
Cricket in the Changing Climate
Sri Lanka has lost the ICC Champions Trophy Semi-finals and many called it is the rain that supported Indian bowlers making conditions difficult to bat. The final has been restricted to T20 match most of the matches in this tournament have been affected by rain, but it is the summer in England that is not expecting this level of extreme raining. “Has Cricket also become a victim of Climate Change” questions climate experts..
Lots of play time has been lost due to rain © AFP
‘Cricket could be the worst affected sport due to Climate Change’ say climate change experts. They made this comment pointing out that Global Warming is changing the weather patterns making difficult to setup a match schedule avoiding rain as usual dry seasons are now get rains due to abnormal weather patterns.
The ICC Champions trophy held in England is also affected by rain. A number of Champions Trophy matches were abandoned and had been cut short. But it is not all as rain can change the playing conditions. For example, the moisture in the turf can help seamers to get movements and make it unplayable. Many commentators think the semifinal between Sri Lanka and India largely depend on the toss due to conditions aggravated by the rain.
However, this is the summer for England where traditionally they play Ashes series, but 2012 and this year the conditions reversed. It is reported that the England’s Met Department also called a special meeting of climate scientists and meteorologists next week to debate the possible causes of the UK’s “disappointing” weather over recent years, as reported by the Guardian newspaper. The report suggest there could be more to it than natural variability of weather as there are Washout summers. Flash floods. Freezing winters. Snow in May. Droughts. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/13/met-office-uk-bad-weather-cause)
This is also the case in Sri Lanka. Wherever Sri Lankan team goes, there is rain, is now a common belief” as lots of matches played by SL were impacted by rain. Not only in Sri Lanka, wherever they go – West Indies, England, India, Australia – atleast few matches are either abandoned or shortened due to rain. There could be many reasons such as there are too many cricket matches being played nowadays and organizers find it hard to schedule it in rain free season. But the fact is all the main tournaments are pre-scheduled looking at the local Climatic Calender too. So where is the disconnect..??
Could it be Climate Change..??
“Though the data doesn’t show a major difference in annual rainfall, the spread of the rainfall patterns have clearly changed” says senior meteorologist Mr.Ananda Jayasinharachchi. He pointed out that extremity of the weather events has increase giving examples, when it rain – it downpours; and having experiencing longer drier period. “but changing of the beginning of rainy season could have been little shifted and the rains that comes, once in a while are sometimes due to low pressure conditions in Bay of Bengal” he pointed out.
The trends everywhere in the world shows that Climate Change is not just a myth, but real. More catastrophe’s are predicted, but South Asians will surely be disheartened that it impacts their favorite game – Cricket.
Forget about total abandonment of a match due to rain. Cricket is more vulnerable to changing climate factors – little bit of moisture can create an unexpected swing, a dried pitch will make it a spinners paradise. So Cricket is indeed a sport likely to feel effects of global warming more than any other sports. It could easily impact the results of the match as well, so can be considered as the future match fixer..?
This is not just an imagination. Scientists had studied during the Ashes series played in Australia in 2006/07, why it was noted that the typical characteristics of each Test ground appeared to be changing and that batsmen were tending to prevail over bowlers more than they might have done in the past. Manoj Joshi who was a university lecturer – has decided to analyse the results with climatic data.
The researcher made an interesting finding that when the series is held in Australia, the home side is statistically more likely to succeed after El Nino years, whereas the English team has a better record following La Nina years. This isn’t really a shock because La Nina years typically see wetter conditions with lower land-surface temperature, therefore better mimicking the conditions the English players are used to. El Nino years, however, tend to see lower-than-average rainfall and higher-than-usual land-surface temperature as per the discussion of the paper. (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wea.403/abstract)
So it is clear that even the South Asian’s favorite sports – the Cricket – will not be spared by the Climate Change. So take your action atleast on your personal capacity not to contribute to the Global Warming..!!
IPCC chief has little hope from Copenhagen climate summit
NEW DELHI: Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) RK Pachauri on Monday said he does not have much hope from next month’s climate summit in Copenhagen. “The kind of agreement that we were hoping for from the summit in Copenhagen seems to have diminished,” Pachauri, also the director general of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), a think tank based here, said on the sidelines of a conference on urban development.
Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh had earlier said that India is not going to accept any legally binding cuts on its greenhouse gas emissions. At a conference last week, Ramesh said: “It seems there is a long haul before we arrive at an international commitment that is legally binding and in which legally binding commitments are taken by the developed countries”. The Dec 7-18 summit of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is unlikely to produce any global deal on combating global warming, because rich countries responsible for the damage have neither promised significant emission cuts nor put on the table significant money to help developing countries fight climate change.
“We should put pressure on the developed countries to tackle the phenomenon of climate change,” said Pachauri, the man who heads the IPCC which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice president Al Gore for its seminal report on climate change that year.
Adding that India should do whatever it can at the domestic level to tackle climate change, Pachauri said: “The effects of climate change will put a big burden on our economy and development. So we cannot ignore it. “We should therefore focus on climate change, otherwise its effects on the coming generations will be huge.”
CLIMATE CHANGE: Dark Clouds Gathering Over Copenhagen
ST. ANDREWS, Nov 7 (IPS) – It has been a bad week for the climate change summit in Copenhagen next month. During the week the last meeting in the formal round of pre- Copenhagen talks collapsed in Barcelona. Then, meeting here on the weekend, the G20 finance ministers put the seal on that failure by failing to agree a financial package.
The G20 is clearly a platform, not a group. And inevitably, the developed nations as they are labelled, and the emerging economies, stuck to their positions, that have conflict and differences built into them.
It is in the nature of these summits that – after all this – everyone still announces an agreement.
The meeting in St. Andrews in fact “turned out to be a mostly irrelevant sideshow on the way to the talks in Copenhagen,” says Richard Dixon, director of WWF Scotland. “This is a group that can throw money at collapsing banks but cannot find adequate figures for the far worse challenge to the global economy of a collapsing climate system.”
Cont. ..
Ambassador Kohona calls for “sufficient incentives” to preserve Sri Lanka’s rain forests
New York , 05 November, (Asiantibune.com):Lanka should be given sufficient incentives to preserve its tropical rainforests for the benefit of all humanity, Ambassador Palitha Kohona told the world body. “From Sri Lankas perspective’s, the Island’ s Permanent Representative said, “tropical rainforests are a major carbon absorption mechanism.”
Furthermore, deforestation of these forests is responsible for increasing carbon emissions of the world. If we are to preserve these forests for the benefit of all humanity, sufficient incentives must be provided to these forest hosting countries to maintain them.
Speaking on the Agenda item ˜53 Sustainable Development” the Lankan Representative, pointed out that his country, despite its geographic limits as an island, and its high population density was still maintaining over 20% forest cover. These forests are a resource that is available for exploitation, but if this resource is not to be utilized for development, as was done by developed countries in their rush to develop, and “practical measures must be made available to preserve forests”, he said.
One possibility we can suggest, Ambassador Kohona said, is to ascribe a carbon value to these forests, enabling that carbon value to be traded in the global carbon market. The envoy told the world body that as the Green Lanka Programme has been finalized as the Road Map for achieving sustainable development of his country. The Action Plan was designed to meticulously explore short, medium, and long-term solutions to meet current and emerging economic and environmental challenges. The ten-year Action Plan covering ten thrust areas was prepared through extensive deliberations with the relevant ministries and all other stakeholders, including the private sector. The Action Plan will ensure sustainable development with major emphasis on addressing energy and climate change issues and other environmental challenges.
About the private sector in Sri Lanka, he said the private enterprise has enthusiastically embraced the new policies of the government for sustainable development. In fact, the Lanka produced garments are marketed in the US under the slogan “Garments without Guilt” in recognition of the principle of ecologically friendly production. Sri Lankan production facilities are world leaders in water conservation.
– Asian Tribune – Visit the link to read the complete article http://www.asiantribune.com/news/2009/11/05/ambassador-kohona-calls-%E2%80%9Csufficient-incentives-preserve-sri-lanka%E2%80%99s-rain-forests
Climate change to kill a quarter million children
New Delhi, Nov 4 (IANS) About a quarter million children could die of climate change and nearly 175 million children will be hit by disasters like floods, cyclones and droughts along with malnutrition and disease, a report released by an NGO said Wednesday.
Launching a new report, “Feeling the Heat – Child Survival in a Changing Climate”, at the UN Climate Change talks in Barcelona Wednesday, Save the Children predicted that 175 million children a year will be hit as natural disasters will increase over the next decade.
According to the report, climate change will more than treble the number of people caught up in natural disasters in the next 20 years. Natural disasters will also become more frequent and severe due to climate change.
“Disasters such as floods, cyclones and droughts will hit children hardest as they get worse with climate change. These disasters will combine with an increase in malnutrition and disease, already the biggest killers of children,” CEO of Save the Children Thomas Chandy said.
The report warned that climate change will exacerbate the leading causes of death of children, including malnutrition and malaria.
“Nearly two million children die every year in India before their fifth birthdays from simple causes like diarrhoea and pneumonia. Climate change will make these threats worse.”
Diarrhoea, the killer of one million children every year, is set to increase by as much as 10 percent by 2020 due to climate change. Malnutrition, which today affects 178 million children and causes 3.2 million child deaths each year, will affect 25 million more children by 2050.
And malaria, responsible for one million child deaths per year, will affect up to 320 million more people by 2080. The organisation also called on world leaders to sign an ambitious climate change agreement at the Copenhagen summit in December to help the world’s poorest children cope with the effects of global warming
“Children in developing countries are not responsible for climate change. Yet, they are the hardest hit by it. It is the responsibility of rich nations that have been emitting greenhouse gases for centuries to help poor communities in developing nations to adapt to the effects of climate change,” Chandy said.
Climate change, justice and faith
…………
One of the best known stories in the early Judeo-Christian scriptures (Genesis chapters 37-47) and in the Qur’an (chapter 12, 4-102) is that of Pharoah, king of Egypt about 4000 years ago who had a worrying dream. The dream’s interpretation that God gave to Joseph was a forecast of a climate crisis – seven years of plenty to be followed by seven years of severe famine. Joseph was put in charge of storing the grain during the years of plenty and of distributing it when the famine came. Joseph’s brothers travelled 300 miles from Canaan to buy grain. Joseph eventually made himself known to them and said, “Do not be … angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you.” A strong message from that story is that God really cared about the peoples of Egypt and nearby countries threatened by starvation because of the climate crisis.
Today, we face a climate crisis of enormous magnitude and proportions, not local but global, not of 7 years duration but lasting indefinitely. Information about it has not come through dreams but through science. To many, science and God are not connected. But if we believe in a creator God, the science we do is God’s science. Two important messages climate change science is bringing are of the severe impact on billions of the world’s poorest people and the threat to millions of the world’s species.
cont….
Please visit http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/nov/04/climate-change-faith-religion-justice to read the completearticle
Beetles, wildfire: Double threat in warming world
The spruce bark beetle, 6 millimeters (.25 inch) long, which has devastated the forests of southwest Yukon, aided by warmer summers that speed up its reproductive process and warmer winters that don't kill off beetle larvae as in the past, is shown by Rob Legare, forest health expert with the Yukon Forest Management Branch . Scientists warn that global warming will spur insect infestations and wildfires in the world's northern forests
HAINES JUNCTION, Yukon Territory – A veil of smoke settled over the forest in the shadow of the St. Elias Mountains, in a wilderness whose spruce trees stood tall and gray, a deathly gray even in the greenest heart of a Yukon summer.
“As far as the eye can see, it’s all infested,” forester Rob Legare said, looking out over the thick woods of the Alsek River valley. Beetles and fire, twin plagues, are consuming northern forests in what scientists say is a preview of the future, in a century growing warmer, as the land grows drier, trees grow weaker and pests, abetted by milder winters, grow stronger.
Dying, burning forests would then only add to the warming.
It’s here in the sub-Arctic and Arctic — in Alaska, across Siberia, in northernmost Europe, and in the Yukon and elsewhere in northern Canada — that Earth’s climate is changing most rapidly. While average temperatures globally rose 0.74 degrees Celsius (1.3 degrees Fahrenheit) in the past century, the far north experienced warming at twice that rate or greater.
In Russia’s frigid east, some average temperatures have risen more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), with midwinter mercury spiking even higher. And “eight of the last 10 summers have been extreme wildfire seasons in Siberia,” American researcher Amber J. Soja pointed out by telephone from central Siberia.
Along with shrinking the polar ice cap and thawing permafrost, scientists say, the warming of the Arctic threatens to turn boreal forest — the vast cover of spruce, pine and other conifers blanketing these high latitudes — into less of a crucial “sink” absorbing carbon dioxide and more of a source, as megatons of that greenhouse gas rise from dead, burning and decaying wood.
American forest ecologist Scott Green worries about a “domino effect.” “These things may occur simultaneously,” said the researcher from the University of Northern British Columbia. “If the bark beetles kill the trees, you’ll have lots of dead, dry wood that will create a really, really hot fire, and then sometimes you don’t get trees regenerating on the site.”
Dominoes may already be falling in western North America. From Colorado to Washington state, an unprecedented, years-long epidemic of mountain pine beetle has killed 2.6 million hectares (6.5 million acres) of forest. The insect has struck even more devastatingly to the north, in British Columbia, where clouds of beetles have laid waste to 14 million hectares (35 million acres) — twice the area of Ireland. It is expected to kill 80 percent of the Canadian province’s lodgepole pines before it’s finished.
Farther north, in the Yukon, the pine beetle isn’t endemic — yet. Here it’s the spruce bark beetle that has eaten its way through 400,000 hectares (1 million acres) of woodland, and even more in neighboring Alaska, in a 15-year-old epidemic unmatched in its longevity and extent. “It’s a fingerprint of climate change,” Aynslie Ogden, senior researcher for the Yukon Forest Management Branch, said in Whitehorse, the territorial capital. “The intensity and severity and magnitude of the infestation is outside the normal.”
Hiking through the wild and beetle-ravaged Alsek valley, Legare, the Yukon agency’s forest health expert, explained how the 6-millimeter (quarter-inch) insect does its damage. “Usually the female bores into the tree first, followed by the male, and then they mate and they both excavate a main egg gallery which runs parallel to the wood grain,” he said. The hatched larvae, just beneath the outer bark, then feed via perpendicular galleries they bore around the tree, cutting off nutrients moving through the phloem and killing the plant. Its needles turn reddish, later gray, and eventually wind topples the dead wood.
Winter spells of minus-40-Celsius (minus-40-Fahrenheit) temperatures once killed off larvae, but those deep freezes now occur less often. And warmer summers enable some beetles to complete their reproductive cycle in one year instead of two, speeding up population growth. Years of summer drought, meanwhile, weakened the spruces’ ability to extrude sticky pitch, to trap and expel beetles. Because the snow-streaked peaks of the 5,000-meter-high (15,000-foot-high) St. Elias range block moisture from the Pacific, a mere 250 millimeters (10 inches) of precipitation falls each year. Even a slight shortfall stresses the trees.
The Yukon has experienced smaller, briefer beetle outbreaks in the past, fed by patches of fallen trees left by road construction. But “what makes this infestation different” is that climate change is a primary cause, said Legare. As he spoke, smoke from dozens of fires, some nearby in the Yukon, some in distant Alaska, wafted over a landscape already bleak with dead forest. In an authoritative 2007 assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N.-sponsored scientific network, cited multiple studies linking the spread of wildfires to warmer, drier conditions.
This June, in the latest such study, as early flames flared in California’s wildfire season, Harvard scientists said the area burned in the western United States could increase by 50 percent by the 2050s, even under the best-case warming scenario projected by the IPCC.
In Siberia, “fire has been increasing, and there’s an earlier fire season,” Soja, of the U.S. National Institute of Aerospace, reported from the Sukachev Institute of Forestry in Krasnoyarsk. Her research this summer found that a warmer, drier climate appears to be stifling regrowth of burned-out areas on the Siberian forest’s southern edge, turning them to grasslands.
In Canada, area burned is double what it was in the 1970s, despite greater firefighting capacity and some recent favorable weather, said Mike Flannigan, a fire researcher for the Canadian Forest Service. He cited three key reasons: warmer temperatures are drying the forests, lengthening the fire season and generating more lightning, cause of the worst wilderness fires.
Flannigan worries, too, that future fires smoldering through the carbon-heavy peatlands that undergird much of the boreal region would pour unparalleled amounts of carbon dioxide, the main global-warming gas, into the skies, feeding an unstoppable cycle. “The bottom line is if you get more fire, you get more emissions, which contributes to further warming, which contributes to more fires,” he said in an interview from Ontario.
“The concern is that things may happen more rapidly than we anticipate. Even our most pessimistic scenarios may not be pessimistic enough.” Back here in smoky gray southwest Yukon, where things are happening, the 1,400 native Champagne-Aishihik people feel it most. The stricken forest’s fallen trees are keeping them from traditional fur-trapping rounds, the streams seem warmer without thick cover overhead, and the fishing is off.
Their oral tradition tells of great change in the past, said the group’s land manager, Graham Boyd. “They’re now wondering what changed to have had this happen.” What’s changed extends beyond Champagne-Aishihik lands to the rest of the Yukon, where forester Legare in his travels finds other insects — the northern spruce engraver, the aspen leaf miner, the willow miner — gaining an upper hand in unusual places in unexpected ways.
“Weird things, unprecedented things are happening,” he said. Over the top of the world in Siberia, they’re girding for a surge in the highly destructive Siberian moth, a caterpillar that devours forests of pine, spruce, fir and larch.
“The moth loves warm and dry, and that’s what’s happening,” said Nadezda M. Tchebakova, Soja’s Siberian research partner. At the same time, she said from Krasnoyarsk, “the frequency and severity of fires should increase.” As the Yukon warms and burns, its foresters hope for at least an early warning on one immediate threat, the mountain pine beetle. They have set traps at the British Columbia border to alert them if the non-native insect moves northward.
“The Yukon pines probably don’t have natural defenses. They may be uniquely susceptible to this pest,” said ecologist Green. “Then you’ll have the potential for fires in large areas of dead trees. With the needles still on them, they literally explode with fire.” Of her Yukon woodlands, Ogden said, “It’s the right forest, the right climate type, and we expect the climate to warm. My sense is it” — the pine beetle — “is almost inevitable.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090823/ap_on_sc/climate_09_beetles_and_smoke
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