Rising global temperatures could make Latin America's melting glaciers completely disappear within 15 years, send hurricanes crashing into places that have never seen them, stop wheat from growing in Africa and change the global face of tourism, a UN report released on Tuesday said.
The report, written and reviewed by hundreds of scientists, outlined dramatic effects of climate change, including rising oceans, food and water shortages, the disappearance of species, and intensifying natural disasters. It said 30 percent of the world's coastlines could be lost by 2080.
Scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provided details of the report in news conferences around the world on Tuesday, four days after releasing a written summary of their findings.
The report was the second of three issued this year; the first dealt with the physical science of climate change and the third will deal with responses to it.
In Mexico City, scientists said that global warming could cost the Brazilian rainforest up to 30 percent of its species and turn large swaths into savannah.
They said ocean levels worldwide will creep up each year, rising 1.3m along Latin American coastlines by 2080 and flooding low-lying cities such as Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires.
Polar ice caps will likely melt, opening a waterway at the North Pole that could make the Panama Canal obsolete, IPCC member Edmundo de Alba said.
Tropical storm seasons will spawn bigger and more dangerous hurricanes that will threaten coastlines not traditionally affected by them, like in 2005, when an unusually strong tropical cyclone formed off Brazil's southern Atlantic coast.
Its 110kph winds prompted many meteorologists to classify it as a hurricane, even though hurricanes are not supposed to occur in the southern Atlantic Ocean.
Latin America's diverse ecosystems will struggle with intense droughts and flooding and as many as 70 million people in the region will be left without enough water, the report said.
By 2080, water shortages could threaten 1.1 billion to 3.2 billion people, depending on the level of greenhouse gases that cars and industry spew into the air.
Water supplies will be most diminished in areas relying on meltdown from mountain ranges, where one-sixth of the world's population lives.
That's especially true in the Andean mountains of Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela, where glaciers are already retreating rapidly and are expected to disappear within 15 years.
"What's clear is [that] places suffering from drought are going to become drier and places with a large amount of precipitation are going to see an increase in precipitation," de Alba said.
Many Latin American farmers will have to abandon traditional crops such as corn, rice, wheat and sugar as their soil becomes increasingly saline, and ranchers will have to find new ways to feed their livestock, scientists said. They warned that governments are doing too little to prepare for the changes.
"We don't have medium or long-term plans in Latin America. Governments look the other way," IPCC member Osvaldo Canziani said in Buenos Aires.
The panel said that Africa is the continent most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The fallout from a swiftly warming planet -- extreme weather, flooding, outbreaks of disease -- will exacerbate troubles in the world's poorest continent, said Anthony Nyong, one of the lead authors.
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