Climate
Change

Slowly unfolding and inevitable

Greenhouse gasses are making the world warmer and warmer. Our immediate global priority must be to create strategies to ease the threats to human development. The effects of climate change ­ rising sea levels, droughts and deluges, and erratic temperatures, will affect the health, security and livelihoods of millions of people worldwide.

Higher temperature

Increased evaporation from oceans

More intense changes in the water cycle creating new water patterns

More extreme weather, floods and droughts

The Warming World

No matter what we do now, in the next one hundred years the world will change dramatically as a result of the greenhouse gasses (mostly carbon dioxide, methane and ozone) that we have already pumped into our atmosphere.

Higher air temperatures will increase evaporation from the oceans and will speed evaporation of water from land. Rainfall patterns will change ­ dry areas will get drier and wet areas will get wetter. Climate change will also bring more extreme weather events, like recent hurricanes.

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was themost concrete step towards mitigating climate change. Governments promised to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 5 per cent of their levels in 1990 by 2012. But neither Australia nor the United States have signed up, and the Protocol does not apply to developing

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countries like China or India. In reality Kyoto covers less than a third of global emissions.

Real progress requires an unprecedented level of international cooperation. Rich countries have to do more to “decarbonize” their economies; but, at the same time, the deepening “environmental footprints” of developing countries cannot be ignored.

In West Africa river discharge has fallen by more than 40% since the 1970’s.

In the 1990s about 201 million people a year were affected by climate related disasters.

The 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1994.

The 1990s was the hottest decade since the 14th century.

The globe will warm 0.2ºC to 0.5ºC every decade in coming years.

Edward Blackie

Water Water Everywhere...

In January 2006, theWaghi River in the western highlands of Papua New Guinea flooded. After months of drought my family had been praying for rain. We needed water for the vegetable gardens where we grow our food and for the coffee plantation we work on. When the rains came they didn’t stop. The river overflowed its banks and washed away everything in the flat valley bottom. Everyone in the village fled into the hills, but our homes, our gardens, our animals, the plantation... Everything was under water.

We thought the worst was over when the water receded, but we were wrong. Everything was covered in a thick layer of mud and sand and debris. The bodies of drowned animals began to decay and we got sick from malaria because the puddles and ponds were ideal breeding places for mosquitoes. It took fourmonths of cleaning and repairing beforemy family could move back home.

The bitter irony of the flooding was that even though we had prayed for rain and the water came, we were dying of thirst. After the flood there was no access to safe water for drinking or washing because the usual streams that we took water from were destroyed or polluted with dead animals. We had to rely on bottled water! Even a year later things still haven’t returned to normal.

Norman Wai, Papua New Guinea