ADB warns of massive climate change migration issues in Asia

Governments in Asia and the Pacific need to prepare for a large increase in climate-induced migration in the coming years, says a forthcoming report by the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
Typhoons, cyclones, floods and drought are forcing more and more people to migrate. In the past year alone, extreme weather in Malaysia, Pakistan, the People's Republic of China, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka has caused temporary or longer term dislocation of millions. The bank said it expects this process to accelerate in coming decades as climate change leads to more extreme weather.
"No international co-operation mechanism has been set up to manage these migration flows, and protection and assistance schemes remain inadequate, poorly coordinated, and scattered," the report states. "National governments and the international community must urgently address this issue in a proactive manner."
ADB expects to issue the report, Climate Change and Migration in Asia and the Pacific, in early March as part of a broader ADB project aimed at increasing awareness of, and enhancing regional preparedness for, migration driven by changing weather patterns.
The report highlights specific risks confronting climate change "hotspots", including megacities in coastal areas of Asia. These hotspots of climate-induced migration face pressure from swelling populations as rural people seek new lives in cities. The problem is compounded by greater dislocation of people caused by flooding and tropical storms.
"Climate-induced migration will affect poor and vulnerable people more than others," said Bart W Édes, Director of ADB's Poverty Reduction, Gender, and Social Development Division. "In many places, those least capable of coping with severe weather and environmental degradation will be compelled to move with few assets to an uncertain future. Those who stay in their communities will struggle to maintain livelihoods in risk-prone settings at the mercy of nature's whims."
Édes recently sketched a four-part scenario for Asian hotspots:

• 1. Climate change will increase extreme weather events, causing injuries and loss of life, water contamination, infectious diseases, food shortages, and mental health problems associated with disaster and tragedy.
• 2. During drought and heavy rainfall, a reduction in crop yield and subsistence agriculture leads to malnutrition and micronutrient deficiencies.
• 3. An increase in the number of very hot days in large cities will exacerbate urban air pollution, while forest fires and dust storms affect air quality over broad areas, both rural and urban.
• 4. Vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue are highly correlated with temperatures and rainfall patterns. Warmer temperature will increase the geographical habitat of vectors of diseases, such as mosquitoes and rodents.

On the positive side, the report says that if properly managed, climate-induced migration could actually facilitate human adaptation, creating new opportunities for dislocated populations in less vulnerable environments.
The ADB project, Policy Options to Support Climate-induced Migration, is the first international initiative that aims to generate policy and financing recommendations to address climate-induced migration in Asia and the Pacific.

Photo Credit: Ronn "Blue" Aldaman

source: http://www.cleanbiz.asia/story/adb-warns-massive-climate-change-migration-issues-asia

Floods show what lies ahead for sinking Bangkok

BANGKOK: The Thai capital, built on swampland, is slowly sinking and the floods currently besieging Bangkok could be merely a foretaste of a grim future as climate change makes its impact felt, experts say.

The low-lying metropolis lies just 30 kilometres (18 miles) north of the Gulf of Thailand, where various experts forecast sea level will rise by 19 to 29 centimetres (7 to 11 inches) by 2050 as a result of global warming.

Water levels would also increase in Bangkok's main Chao Phraya river, which already overflows regularly.

If no action is taken to protect the city, "in 50 years... most of Bangkok will be below sea level," said Anond Snidvongs, a climate change expert at the capital's Chulalongkorn University.

But global warming is not the only threat. The capital's gradual sinking has also been blamed on years of aggressive groundwater extraction to meet the growing needs of the city's factories and its 12 million inhabitants.

As a result Bangkok was sinking by 10 centimetres a year in the late 1970s, according to a study published last year by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation.

That rate has since dropped to less than one centimetre annually, they said, thanks to government measures to control groundwater pumping.

If those efforts continued, the report authors said, they hoped the subsidence rate could slow by another 10 percent each year.

But Anond disputed their projections, saying Bangkok was still sinking at "an alarming rate" of one to three centimetres per year.

While scientists may argue over the exact figures, they agree about what lies in store for the sprawling megacity.

"There is no going back. The city is not going to rise again," said the ADB's lead climate change specialist David McCauley.

Faced with the combined threats of land subsidence and rising temperatures and sea levels, the World Bank has predicted that Bangkok's flood risk will increase four-fold from now by 2050.

And the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has classified the Thai capital among the 10 cities in the world facing the biggest potential impact from coastal flooding by 2070.

For now, Bangkok is relying on a complex system of dykes, canals, locks and pumping stations to keep the rising waters at bay.

The flood protection efforts, however, failed to prevent an onslaught of run-off water from the north from swamping at least one-fifth of the capital.

The murky floodwaters, triggered by three months of heavy monsoon rains, are edging in on Bangkok's glitzy downtown area, threatening luxury hotels, office buildings and shopping malls.

Rapid urbanisation is one reason why the inundations are affecting the sprawling city so badly, according to experts.

As the area that needs flood protection gets larger and more built-up, the water "has fewer places to go", said Francois Molle, a water management expert at France's Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement.

Molle said that in the long term, Bangkok would eventually be under water.

"The only question is when," said Molle.

Experts say Thai authorities must address the capital's land use and planning challenges and consider relocating factories or industrial parks in flood-prone areas.

Or even moving the entire city.

"It may be appropriate for the people who want to be dry 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to be setting up a new city," said Anond.

"We do have areas where we can develop a new city that would be completely dry. There's a lot of land in this country," he said.

It may sound like a drastic scenario, but there is little doubt that Bangkok will have to act if it wants to avoid the fate of the fabled sunken city of Atlantis.

"To remain where it is, the city will need better protection," said Robert Nicholls, a professor of coastal engineering at Britain's University of Southampton.

He said he expected Bangkok's current flood misery to "trigger massive investment in defences over the next 10 to 20 years".

Dealing with the phenomenon will be expensive elsewhere too. Across the Asia-Pacific region the ADB has estimated it will cost a minimum of $10 billion a year to adapt to climate change.

- AFP/fa

Source: http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific/view/1163860/1/.html

Wild weather worsening due to climate change, IPCC confirms

Bangkok residents make their way through floodwaters near Don Muang airport in Thailand. Photograph: Apichart Weerawong/AP

Final draft of a report from the UN climate panel warns that weather extremes will come at huge cost

Freakish weather disasters — from the sudden October snowstorm in the north-east US to the record floods in Thailand — are striking more often. And global warming is likely to spawn more similar weather extremes at a huge cost, says a draft summary of an international climate report obtained by The Associated Press.
The final draft of the report from a panel of the world's top climate scientists paints a wild future for a world already weary of weather catastrophes costing billions of dollars. The report says costs will rise and perhaps some locations will become "increasingly marginal as places to live."
The report from the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be issued in a few weeks, after a meeting in Uganda. It says there is at least a two-in-three probability that weather extremes have already worsened because of man-made greenhouse gases.
This marks a change in climate science from focusing on subtle changes in daily average temperatures to concentrating on the harder-to-analyse freak events that grab headlines, cause economic damage and kill people. The most recent bizarre weather extreme, the pre-Halloween snowstorm in the US, is typical of the damage climate scientists warn will occur – but it's not typical of the events they tie to global warming.
"The extremes are a really noticeable aspect of climate change," said Jerry Meehl, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. "I think people realise that the extremes are where we are going to see a lot of the impacts of climate change."
The snow-bearing Nor'easter cannot be blamed on climate change and probably isn't the type of storm that will increase with global warming, four meteorologists and climate scientists said. They agree more study is needed. But experts on extreme storms have focused more closely on the increasing numbers of super-heavy rainstorms, not snow, Nasa climate scientist Gavin Schmidt said.
The opposite kind of disaster – the drought in Texas and the south-west US – is also the type of event scientists are saying will happen more often as the world warms, said Schmidt and Meehl, who reviewed part of the climate panel report. No studies have specifically tied global warming to the drought, but it is consistent with computer models that indicate current climate trends will worsen existing droughts, Meehl said.
Studies also have predicted more intense monsoons with climate change. Warmer air can hold more water and puts more energy into weather systems, changing the dynamics of storms and where and how they hit.
Thailand is now coping with massive flooding from monsoonal rains that illustrate how climate is also interconnected with other manmade issues such as population and urban development, river management and sinking lands, Schmidt said. In fact, the report says that "for some climate extremes in many regions, the main driver for future increases in losses will be socioeconomic in nature" rather than greenhouse gases.
The report, which needs approval by diplomats at the mid-November meeting, tries to measure the confidence scientists have in their assessment of climate extremes both future and past.
Chris Field, one of the leaders of the climate change panel, said he and other authors won't comment because the report still is subject to change. The summary chapter of the report didn't detail which regions of the world might suffer extremes so severe as to leave them marginally habitable.
The report does say scientists are "virtually certain" – 99% – that the world will have more extreme spells of heat and fewer of cold. Heat waves could peak as much as 5C hotter by mid-century and even 9C hotter by the end of the century.
Weather Underground meteorology director Jeff Masters, who wasn't involved in the study, said in the United States from June to August this year, blistering heat set 2,703 daily high temperature records, compared with only 300 cold records during that period, making it the hottest summer in the US since the Dust Bowl of 1936.
By the end of the century, the intense, single-day, heavy rainstorms that now typically happen only once every 20 years are likely to happen about twice a decade, the report says.
The report said hurricanes and other tropical cyclones – like 2005's Katrina – are likely to get stronger in wind speed, but won't increase in number and may actually decrease. Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorology professor Kerry Emanuel, who studies climate's effects on hurricanes, disagrees and believes more of these intense storms will occur.
And global warming isn't the sole villain in future climate disasters, the climate report says. An even bigger problem will be the number of people – especially the poor – who live in harm's way.
University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver, who wasn't among the authors, said the report was written to be "so bland" that it may not matter to world leaders.
But Masters said the basics of the report seem to be proven true by what's happening every day. "In the US, this has been the weirdest weather year we've had for my 30 years, hands down. Certainly this October snowstorm fits in with it."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/01/climate-change-weather-ipcc

Burma asks for help with green technologies

By AFP

Published: November 1, 2011

Solar power is one area the Burmese government has requested outside help in (Reuters)

Burma urged developed nations on Tuesday to share their green technologies, in the military-backed government’s latest effort to reach out to the global community.
“Being a developing country, we need technological transfer, particularly for the development of renewable energy through solar, wind and tidal power,” Environmental Conservation and Forestry Minister Win Tun said as he opened a conference in the capital.
He said the experiences of other countries would “provide an opportunity to develop a road map for green growth for Myanmar [Burma].” Burma’s first-ever Green Economy and Green Growth Forum comes just weeks after the authoritarian regime stunned observers by freezing work an unpopular Chinese-backed mega dam in a rare concession to public opinion.
Burma is one of the world’s least developed countries but it is rich in natural resources such as oil, gas, minerals and gems.

Source: http://www.dvb.no/news/burma-asks-for-help-with-green-technologies/18486