Africa and much of South Asia face extreme risk from climate change but top carbon polluters will be relatively shielded from its ravages, according to a ranking of 166 countries obtained by AFP on Wednesday.
Somalia, Haiti and Afghanistan top the Climate Change Vulnerability Index, calculated from dozens of variables measuring the capacity of a country to cope with the consequences of global warming.
“We wanted to look at what is going to impact human populations,” said Fiona Place, environmental risk analyst at Maplecroft, a Britain-based firm that provides global risk intelligence for businesses.
Even if the world agrees at make-or-break climate talks in December to slash carbon dioxide emissions, many of those impacts — rising sea levels, increased disease, flooding and drought — are already inevitable, UN scientists say.
Of the 28 nations deemed at “extreme risk”, 22 are in Africa.
Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are similarly threatened, with Pakistan right on the edge and India not far behind.
At the other end of the spectrum, Norway, Finland, Japan, Canada and New Zealand are best insulated, because of a combination of wealth, good governance, well-managed ecosystems and high resource security.
The US and Australia — the largest per capita emitters of carbon dioxide among developed nations — are comfortably within the top 15 countries least at risk, the index showed.
With the exception of Chile and Israel, the rest of the 41 countries in the “low risk” category of the ranking are European or from the Arab Peninsula.
Japan’s enviable position is a result of its highly-developed infrastructure, its stable political and economic system, and its overall food and water security, Place said.
Although it imports much of its energy needs, it does so from many sources, spreading the risk.
She said “Japan is also relatively rich in biodiversity, including well-managed forests. Human induced soil erosion is not a critical issue.”
“That’s in contrast to, say, Ethiopia” — or dozens of other poor nations — “where there’s a high population density and soil erosion is a real issue, impacting the ability to grow crops,” she said.
One weak point in Japan, however, is the high concentration of populations along the coast exposed to rising sea levels.
“Japan does need to take very seriously the issue of climate change vulnerability,” Place said.
Another country threatened by ocean levels, which many scientists say will go up by at least 1m by the end of this century, is Bangladesh, most of whose 150 million people live in low-lying delta areas.
Among the BRIC economies — Brazil, Russia, India and China — only India is in the “high risk” group, because of high population density, security risks and especially its resource security.
India’s food vulnerability was highlighted last month by a study in the British journal Nature, which said the country’s underground water supply was being depleted at an alarming rate.
China and Brazil face “medium” risk, while Russia is in the “low” category.
Many small island states literally at risk of being washed off the map by rising seas, such as Tuvalu and the Maldives, were not included in the ranking.
The climate change index is based on 33 distinct criteria grouped into six sub-indexes: economy, government institutions, poverty and development, ecosystems, resource security, and population density in relation to infrastructure.
The two items weighted most heavily are potential impact of rising sea levels and mismanagement of land resources including forests and agriculture.
Indonesia yesterday began enforcing its newly ratified penal code, replacing a Dutch-era criminal law that had governed the country for more than 80 years and marking a major shift in its legal landscape. Since proclaiming independence in 1945, the Southeast Asian country had continued to operate under a colonial framework widely criticized as outdated and misaligned with Indonesia’s social values. Efforts to revise the code stalled for decades as lawmakers debated how to balance human rights, religious norms and local traditions in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation. The 345-page Indonesian Penal Code, known as the KUHP, was passed in 2022. It
‘DISRESPECTFUL’: Katie Miller, the wife of Trump’s most influential adviser, drew ire by posting an image of Greenland in the colors of the US flag, captioning it ‘SOON’ US President Donald Trump on Sunday doubled down on his claim that Greenland should become part of the US, despite calls by the Danish prime minister to stop “threatening” the territory. Washington’s military intervention in Venezuela has reignited fears for Greenland, which Trump has repeatedly said he wants to annex, given its strategic location in the arctic. While aboard Air Force One en route to Washington, Trump reiterated the goal. “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security, and Denmark is not going to be able to do it,” he said in response to a reporter’s question. “We’ll worry about Greenland in
PERILOUS JOURNEY: Over just a matter of days last month, about 1,600 Afghans who were at risk of perishing due to the cold weather were rescued in the mountains Habibullah set off from his home in western Afghanistan determined to find work in Iran, only for the 15-year-old to freeze to death while walking across the mountainous frontier. “He was forced to go, to bring food for the family,” his mother, Mah Jan, said at her mud home in Ghunjan village. “We have no food to eat, we have no clothes to wear. The house in which I live has no electricity, no water. I have no proper window, nothing to burn for heating,” she added, clutching a photograph of her son. Habibullah was one of at least 18 migrants who died
Russia early yesterday bombarded Ukraine, killing two people in the Kyiv region, authorities said on the eve of a diplomatic summit in France. A nationwide siren was issued just after midnight, while Ukraine’s military said air defenses were operating in several places. In the capital, a private medical facility caught fire as a result of the Russian strikes, killing one person and wounding three others, the State Emergency Service of Kyiv said. It released images of rescuers removing people on stretchers from a gutted building. Another pre-dawn attack on the neighboring city of Fastiv killed one man in his 70s, Kyiv Governor Mykola
RSS