Top polluters are safest, study says
Somalia and Sri Lanka are among the countries at greatest risk from
climate change, while the US and Japan are within the top 15 nations
least at risk.
Africa and much of South Asia face extreme risk from climate change
but top carbon polluters will be relatively shielded from its ravages,
according to a ranking of 166 countries obtained by AFP on Wednesday.
Somalia, Haiti and Afghanistan top the Climate Change Vulnerability
Index, calculated from dozens of variables measuring the capacity of a
country to cope with the consequences of global warming.
“We wanted to look at what is going to impact human populations,”
said Fiona Place, environmental risk analyst at Maplecroft, a
Britain-based firm that provides global risk intelligence for
businesses.
Even if the world agrees at make-or-break climate talks in December
to slash carbon dioxide emissions, many of those impacts - rising sea
levels, increased disease, flooding and drought - are already
inevitable, UN scientists say.
Of the 28 nations deemed at “extreme risk”, 22 are in Africa.
Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are similarly threatened, with Pakistan
right on the edge and India not far behind.
At the other end of the spectrum, Norway, Finland, Japan, Canada and
New Zealand are best insulated, because of a combination of wealth, good
governance, well-managed ecosystems and high resource security.
The US and Australia - the largest per capita emitters of carbon
dioxide among developed nations - are comfortably within the top 15
countries least at risk, the index showed.
With the exception of Chile and Israel, the rest of the 41 countries
in the “low risk” category of the ranking are European or from the Arab
Peninsula.
Japan’s enviable position is a result of its highly-developed
infrastructure, its stable political and economic system, and its
overall food and water security, Place said.
Although it imports much of its energy needs, it does so from many
sources, spreading the risk.
She said “Japan is also relatively rich in biodiversity, including
well-managed forests.
Human induced soil erosion is not a critical issue.”
“That’s in contrast to, say, Ethiopia” - or dozens of other poor
nations - “where there’s a high population density and soil erosion is a
real issue, impacting the ability to grow crops,” she said.
One weak point in Japan, however, is the high concentration of
populations along the coast exposed to rising sea levels.
“Japan does need to take very seriously the issue of climate change
vulnerability,” Place said.
Another country threatened by ocean levels, which many scientists say
will go up by at least 1m by the end of this century, is Bangladesh,
most of whose 150 million people live in low-lying delta areas. Among
the BRIC economies - Brazil, Russia, India and China - only India is in
the “high risk” group, because of high population density, security
risks and especially its resource security. India’s food vulnerability
was highlighted last month by a study in the British journal Nature,
which said the country’s underground water supply was being depleted at
an alarming rate.
China and Brazil face “medium” risk, while Russia is in the “low”
category.
Many small island states literally at risk of being washed off the
map by rising seas, such as Tuvalu and the Maldives, were not included
in the ranking.
The climate change index is based on 33 distinct criteria grouped
into six sub-indexes: economy, government institutions, poverty and
development, ecosystems, resource security, and population density in
relation to infrastructure.
The two items weighted most heavily are potential impact of rising
sea levels and mismanagement of land resources including forests and
agriculture. Taipei Times Paris
(AFP) |