DID YOU KNOW
By: Cyril BromleyDid you know?
* Climate change could cause an additional 40,000 to 160,000 child deaths per year in South Asia and sub-Saharan
* With temperature increases of 2°C, an additional 30 - 200 million people will be placed at risk of hunger globally rising to as many as 550 million with warming of 3°C.
* The negative impact on livelihoods may make it more likely that parents remove their children from school - and in most cultures this will almost certainly mean removing girls first - so that they can collect water and fuel and supplement household income
* Changes in environmental factors mean malaria - which already kills 800,000 children every year - is now being seen in areas which were previously outside the range of malarial mosquitoes, such as the highlands of Kenya and Jamaica.
On top of all this climate change will increase the burden of diarrhea disease in low income countries by between 2 and 5 per cent by 2020. Dengue: Estimates suggest the population at risk could increase to 3.5 billion by 2080 (from 1.5 billion today) due to climate changes.
30 April 2008
4 comments
4 comments so far
Jill Menzies
2008-05-07 03:14:14How is that the world come to believe that something is wrong and that the planet is warming. Thirty years ago the belief was that the planet was cooling and this was the biggest threat. The belief then was that Global Cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years. We now know that the world has warmed since 1680, the nadir of a cool period called the Little Ice Age (LIA) that has generally continued to the present. These climate changes are well within natural variability and explained quite easily by changes in the sun. If you look at climate data by the 1990's temperatures Global Warming is a concern. It appears that we'll witness another cycle, as the major mechanisms and the global temperature trends now indicate a cooling. Meanwhile the world listens to people who have no knowledge or understanding of science, especially the science of climate and climate change.
Marian Thornton
2008-05-02 02:52:35Climate change could cause many child deaths. Shockingly, The World Health Organization estimates that 1.5 million children die each year because they are not adequately breastfed. Breast milk substitutes, especially in the Majority World, is part of the problem, encouraging mothers to give up breastfeeding in favor of expensive, nutritionally inferior milk formula.
Tim O’Grady
2008-05-02 02:08:52Even if there are some "winners" from climate change - perhaps farmers in high-latitude farm regions where the growing season will be extended by warmer temperatures - there will also be large numbers of losers. Over the course of a few decades, if not sooner, hundreds of millions of people may be compelled to relocate because of environmental pressures. To a significant extent, water will be the most important determinant of these population movements. Dramatic changes in the relationship between water and society will be widespread. For certain there will be raising sea levels, stronger tropical cyclones, the loss of soil moisture under higher temperatures, more intense precipitation and flooding, more frequent droughts as well as the melting of glaciers and the changing seasonality of snowmelt. Extensive pollution of rivers and lakes, mass migrations may be unavoidable.
Diesel Cross
2008-04-30 03:11:59The world’s poorest and most vulnerable children are being hit the hardest by the impact of climate change. A UN report, ‘Our climate, our children, our responsibility: the implications of climate change for the world’s children’ draws attention to the fact that climate change is impacting very seriously many children and their rights. It calls for immediate action from the UK Government to make children a priority in the climate change agenda and calls on UK companies to substantially reduce emissions and contribute to the costs of mitigating and adapting to climate change.