Weather-related catastrophes brought about by climate change are increasing, the top UN humanitarian official said yesterday as he warned of the possibility of “mega-disasters.”
UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes said one of the biggest challenges facing the aid community was the problems stemming from changing weather patterns.
“When it comes meteorological disasters, weather-related disasters, then there is a trend upwards connected with climate change,” said Holmes, who was in Australia for high-level talks on humanitarian aid. “The trend is there is terms of floods and cyclones and droughts.”
Holmes said it had been a tough year because of January’s devastating earthquake in Haiti that killed more than 250,000 people.
He said while earthquakes, such as the magnitude 7 quake which leveled the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, were random, weather-related natural disasters were increasing in number and scale.
“It’s partly the very obvious things, like the number of cyclones and the intensity of the cyclones, and the amount of flooding, but [it] is also in slightly more invisible ways — in Africa, with drought spreading, desertification spreading,” he said.
Holmes said officials were particularly concerned about places where a combination of factors — such as large populations, likelihood of earthquake or susceptibility to rising sea levels — made them more vulnerable.
“One of [the] things we worry about is mega cities could produce, at some point, a mega disaster,” he said. “Cities like Kathmandu, for example, which sits on two earthquake faults, where a large earthquake will come along ... and the results could be catastrophic.”
Holmes said while some countries were well-prepared for disaster — such as Chile which was hit with a massive magnitude 8.8 earthquake in February which left 520 people dead — others such as Haiti were less able to manage.
“That’s one of the reasons we want to focus on not just how we respond to disaster, we need to do that, but how you reduce the impact of those disasters before they happen,” Holmes said.
In Haiti, the situation remained serious, he said, with some 1.5 million people living in makeshift shelters and little prospect of this changing soon.
“There are real concerns about how vulnerable people still are, despite all the efforts that have been made,” he said.
Holmes said the need for humanitarian aid was rising faster than resources were available, particularly given the long-running conflicts in areas such as Sudan’s Darfur and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
At the same time, climate change would likely set in chain migration because of drought or rising sea levels, or conflicts because of a scarcity of water or arable land.
“So all these things are going to create more problems for us and we’re really just coming to grips with what the consequences might be, and you can construct some extremely scary scenarios for yourself without too much trouble,” he said. “For example, about what the effect might be of glaciers melting in the Himalayas. Now we don’t quite know whether that’s happening, or will happen, or not, but if it did, what would the effect be on the major river systems of southern Asia?”
Holmes said while a decade ago, climate change was not on officials’ radars, “now it’s on everybody’s agenda.”
“Climate change for us is not some future indeterminate threat, it’s happening in front of our eyes,” he said. “We can see it.”
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