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Extreme weather
Populations will be particularly affected when extreme weather events damage health and sanitary infrastructure. Vulnerable groups such as the elderly and the very young are likely to experience higher heat related morbidity and mortality, and will be disproportionately affected by increased ozone and smog formation in higher temperatures. Allergies too may increase. Rising ambient temperatures may increase risks associated with aquatic pathogens in important fisheries, and accelerate the spoiling of food and meat.
Declining agricultural yields
Security of food supply is a fundamental determinant of human wellbeing and a prerequisite for sustainable development. In the Global South, food production is a major source of employment and export earnings. The adverse affects of climate change on agriculture will thus disproportionately burden poor countries.
Much of the population of Latin America experiences inadequate food security, from malnutrition to the extreme of intermittent famine. Human Development Report 2005 records approximately 10% of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean as malnourished. However, this figure is much higher in very poor Caribbean and Central American states such as Haiti (47%), Honduras (22%) and Guatemala (24%), which are likely to be seriously affected by climate change related extreme weather events.
While climate change may increase agricultural yields in some limited circumstances, the IPCC projects its effect on Latin America will be generally to reduce yields, and exacerbate food shortages, even with adaptation measures such as changing crops. The IPCC reports that parts of northeast Brazil already prone to famine are likely to experience very severe impacts on the yields of subsistence farmers.
Climate change will also reduce commercial farming and fisheries yields upon which poor countries rely for export earnings. Grain cropping production and forestry is forecast to decline. On the coast, the effect of sea level rise on natural barriers such as mangroves may threaten coastal farmland. Valuable estuarine fisheries may be lost, and tourism threatened by the bleaching of coral reefs.
Many rural populations in Latin America are already very poor and have few resources with which to adapt their farm practices or endure more frequent bad seasons. The World Bank notes that at least 70 percent of the rural population lives in poverty in Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay and Peru. Extreme poverty afflicts more than a third of the rural population in Bolivia, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay and Peru.
Natural disasters
Given the rapid urbanisation of the world's developing countries, the impact of climate change on the housing and wellbeing of urban populations is especially important. Like their rural counterparts, the most vulnerable urban populations will bear the greatest impacts. The major long-term impact is likely to be severe housing shortages and overcrowding as rural populations are displaced by drought and flooding. The lack of safe water and sanitary infrastructure in emergency camps or slum areas could seriously increase the incidence of mortality and morbidity from transmissible diseases. The IPCC reported in 2001 that these internal environmental refugees may 'present the most serious health consequences of climate change'. Violence and social tension, already severe in the poorest slums and shantytowns of Latin American and Caribbean cities, is likely to intensify.
The IPCC notes that those displaced by natural disasters in rural areas may remain at risk in urban areas where shantytowns and slums are often situated on land prone to flooding or landslide. Increased intensity and frequency of extreme weather events will threaten these precarious settlements and their marginalised populations.
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