Environmental Impact
Climate change is the biggest challenge facing the world. The fourth assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007), confirmed that climate change was happening (with increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global mean sea level already being observed) and that human activity played a key role.
“In Bangladesh flooding is normal. It’s tropical and a delta. But what we are observing at the moment is that before big flooding came every 10-15 years. Now there is one after another. 2004 and 2007 both had big floods. There are also more frequent floods now, due to rainfall in India and Nepal. It’s affecting crops and people are taking shelter and are expecting external assistance. Over a period of three years about 10 to 11 million people have been affected.”
Nazmul Chowdhury, Practical Action Bangladesh
Although we cannot be sure exactly how the climate will change in future, The IPPC Fourth Assessment Report projects global temperature increases of at least 0.2ºC per decade for the next two decades (on top of the 0.7º we’ve already had) in most of the scenarios. To put this into perspective, the likelihood of ‘dangerous and irreversible’ climate change increases considerably if we go over 2ºC above pre-industrial levels (Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, 2005).
It also states that over the coming years:
- The frequency and intensity of storms are likely to increase
- There will be more areas affected by drought
- There will be more and hotter heatwaves in temperate zones, such as Western Europe and Western North America
- Ecosystems and biodiversity will be irreversibly affected
- Certain diseases, like malaria and cholera, could become more common
- Sea levels are likely to rise; the IPCC estimates between 18 and 59 centimetres by the end of the century, although the level of shoreline retreat will be much greater due to landscape morphology
These estimates may prove to be accurate. But it seems more and more likely they will be looked back on in years to come and seen as timid. Since the deadline for the last assessment report, climate science has come a long way.
The most recent climate data has more serious implications than anything considered by the IPCC. This positive feedback would accelerate climate change, meaning that processes thought only possible in the far future could happen much sooner.
“We’re breaking meteorological records at a record speed. These changes are happening faster than the IPCC predictions and they will have an accelerating effect.”
John Christensen, head of UNEP’s Risoe Centre on Energy,
Climate and Sustainable Development
‘Climate Code Red’, a report from Friends of the Earth in Australia, produced in conjunction with Carbon Equity and Greenleap Strategic Institute, reviewed some of these changes. It makes alarming reading – Arctic sea ice could disappear in summer by 2013, almost a century earlier than suggested by the IPCC; flows of glaciers in Greenland and West Antarctica could increase; and faster and more significant sea level rises, ocean acidification, decreases in the absorption of CO2 by the oceans and releases of greenhouse gases from soil and forests due to warming are all anticipated.
Climate change will affect the basic elements of life for people around the world; access to water, food production, health and the environment. Hundreds of millions of people could suffer hunger, water shortages and coastal flooding as the world warms (Stern Review Report). The Royal Society believes that our trajectory has temperatures rising by approx 6ºC by 2100. If the world warmed to this level, it could only sustain the lives of one billion people but the current global population is approximately six billion and is predicted to rise to nine billion.