Major Asian cities face climate disaster: WWF
By Roberto Coloma
SINGAPORE — Low-lying and impoverished Asian coastal cities such as Dhaka, Manila and Jakarta are vulnerable to “brutal” damage from climate change without global action, environmental group WWF warned Thursday.
Energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions must be curtailed in “mega-cities” where global warming will affect everything from national security to health and water availability, the influential campaign group said.
“Climate change is already shattering cities across developing Asia and will be even more brutal in the future,” said Kim Carstensen, head of the WWF Global Climate Initiative.
Including their suburbs, Dhaka, Manila and Jakarta now have a combined population of about 49 million, according to WWF.
It said better-off cities such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore also faced varying degrees of risk from climate change, such as rising sea levels, excessive rain, flooding and heatwaves.
Hong Kong could see dramatically fewer cold days per year while dengue fever appears to be spreading to previously unaffected parts of Singapore, it noted.
“Asia is the most populous and arguably the most vulnerable continent in the world because of the high risk of climate impacts and relatively low adaptive capacity,” the report said.
“Unfortunately, the full extent of climate change has likely not been fully realised,” it said, noting that temperatures in Asia have risen by one to three degrees Centigrade (two to five degrees Fahrenheit) in the last 100 years.
WWF issued its report to coincide with a weekend summit here to be attended by US President Barack Obama, Chinese President Hu Jintao and other Asia-Pacific leaders.
The summit takes place three weeks before crucial talks on a new world climate pact open in Copenhagen on December 7.
WWF said that on a “vulnerability” scale going up to 10, Dhaka rated nine points, and Manila and Jakarta eight each.
Calcutta and Phnom Penh received scores of seven each on the WWF danger scale, Ho Chi Minh City and Shanghai six each, Bangkok five, and Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong and Singapore four each.
Poorer Asian nations urgently need financial, technological and training support from industrialised countries to save lives, protect national assets and preserve the cities’ economic contributions, it said.
Mark Dia, the Manila-based deputy campaign director for Greenpeace in Southeast Asia, told AFP that the report showed “disaster management should be top of the agenda for the government.”
Tropical storm Ketsana dumped record amounts of rainfall over the Philippine capital in September, leaving more than 400 people dead and vast swathes of the city flooded for weeks.
WWF urged the leaders of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum to use their summit to promote strategies to reduce carbon emissions across the 21-member organisation.
In a communique to be issued at the end of their annual meeting Sunday, the APEC leaders are expected to call for sweeping emissions cuts and declare their support for a global deal at next month’s Copenhagen climate gathering.
In the short term, APEC will seek to open up trade in environmental goods and services, known as green technology, as part of efforts to fight climate change and achieve sustainable economic growth.
The December 7-18 Copenhagen talks are aimed at achieving a global deal to slash greenhouse gas emissions and ease the impact of climate change before the 2012 expiry of the Kyoto Protocol, which excludes the United States.
China’s Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said Thursday that it would seek a “fair and reasonable” result at Copenhagen but reiterated that rich nations must bear most of the burden for redressing global warming.
