Left: This image shows the severity of river erosion in Bangladesh, a problem which will continue to increase as sea levels rise and storm intensity increases. Erosion on this scale has a devastating impact on infrastructure and farmland.
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Below: Any piece of ground which has remained frozen for at least two years is, by definition, permafrost. Fairbanks, Alaska – where this image was taken – is just below the Arctic Circle. In recent years, due to higher average yearround temperatures, the area’s permafrost has been melting. As it gives way, trees that have been growing on top of it start to lean over at extreme angles (known locally as drunken trees) and infrastructure such as roads and buildings begin to buckle.
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ccording to a recent report issued by former UN that they have done least to create. I have no doubt of the Secretary General Kofi Annan’s think tank, the Global difficulties which must be overcome to reach agreement in Humanitarian Forum, climate change is causing Copenhagen. But I am equally in no doubt about the conse30,000 deaths a year and is affecting 300 million quences if we fail. The clock is ticking. Every year we delay, people. By 2030, increasingly severe heatwaves, floods, the greater the damage, the more extensive the human misery storms and forest fires could be responsible for claiming as – and the higher the cost, pain and disruption of inevitable many as 500,000 lives annually. action later. So this conference must provide a powerful voice Devastation on this scale should send a chill down the for the millions of victims of climate change.” spine. But the fact that so many people remain ignorant Current UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has also of the warning signs and oblivious to the true reality only taken steps to draw attention to the need for world leaders goes to prove the point that climate change is arguably to take united action at December’s climate change talks. the world’s greatest humanitarian challenge. Proof – as if it He recently visited the Arctic Circle in Norway to see for were needed – of the scale of the threat is all too evident in himself the melting polar ice cap, which is disappearing even the rapidly eroding Carteret Islands to the east of Papua faster than predicted. “If this trend is not stopped, we may New Guinea, where the population has become the world’s have a virtually ice-free Arctic within 30 years,” he warns. first entire peoples to be officially evacuated as a result of These doomsday scenarios seem to worsen on a daily baclimate change. sis as media reports continue to highlight the latest shocking The recent Global Humanitarian Forum study states that developments. For example, did you know that temperatures if emissions aren’t brought under control within 25 years, in in the Arctic are at their warmest for 2,000 years? Or that huraddition to the figures mentioned above, 310 million more ricanes in the Atlantic are now more frequent than at any time people will suffer adverse health consequences related to in the last 1,000 years? Or that the world’s coral reefs face a temperature increases, while 20 million more will fall into catastrophic future? Such panic-inducing headlines and dire poverty. All of which heaps more pressure on the world warnings are commonplace, but their impact on a seemingly leaders who are due to attend the UN Climate Change blasé society at large is questionable. Some people, however, Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009. Annan, are seriously concerned and have taken the situation to heart, however, is in no doubt about what needs to be done. such as Dr Larch Maxey from Swansea University in Wales. “There must be deep, binding and fair targets to cut emis- Back in June, he famously refused an all-expenses-paid trip sions of greenhouse gases,” he says. “The agreement world to Washington to attend a conference on tackling carbon leaders strike in Copenhagen must be based on climate emissions. He described the invitation to the Smithsonian justice. It must have at its heart the principle that pollution has Festival as “the irony of our times,” explaining that the return a price and the polluter must pay. It must recognize that the flight across the Atlantic would use several years’ worth of his world’s poorest are carrying the heaviest burden for a problem carbon share.