UN climate report

23rd June, 2021 Environment

GS PAPER II: Conservation, environmental pollution and degradation, environmental impact assessment.

Context: UN climate report reveals dire health threats

Key highlights of the report:

Hunger, drought and disease will afflict tens of millions more people within decades, according to a draft UN assessment that lays bare the dire human health consequences of a warming planet.
Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), offers a distressing vision of the decades to come: malnutrition, water insecurity, pestilence.
It warns of the cascading impacts that simultaneous crop failures, falling nutritional value of basic foods, and soaring inflation are likely to have on the world's most vulnerable people.
It predicts that up to 80 million more people than today will be at risk of hunger by 2050.

COVID-19, climate and carbon neutrality

It projects disruptions to the water cycle that will see rain-fed staple crops decline across sub-Saharan Africa.
Up to 40% of rice-producing regions in India could become less suitable for farming the grain.
Global maize production has already declined 4% since 1981 due to climate change, and human-induced warming in West Africa has reduced millet and sorghum yields by up to 20 and 15% respectively.
The frequency of sudden food production losses has already increased steadily over the past 50 years.
The basis for our health is sustained by three pillars: the food we eat, access to water, and shelter. These pillars are totally vulnerable and about to collapse.

Emerging hotspots

Rising temperatures affect the availability of key crops and their nutritional value is declining.
Depleted soils: Another reasons for low nutrients can be that the soils supporting plants could be low in plant-available nutrients
The protein content of rice, wheat, barley and potatoes, for example, is expected to fall by between six and 14%, putting close to 150 million more people at risk of protein deficiency.
Essential micronutrients — already lacking in many diets in poorer nations — are also set to decline as temperatures rise.
Extreme weather events made more frequent by rising temperatures will see "multi-breadbasket failures" hit food production ever more regularly.
As climate change reduces yields, and demand for biofuel crops and CO2-absorbing forests grows, food prices are projected to rise as much as a third at 2050, bringing an additional 183 million people in low-income households to the edge of chronic hunger.
Across Asia and Africa, 10 million more children than now will suffer from malnutrition and stunting by mid-century, saddling a new generation with life-long health problems — despite greater socioeconomic development.

Water crisis looming

The report outlines access to safe water will be thrown into turmoil by climate change.
Up to three quarters of heavily tapped groundwater supply — the main source of potable water for 2.5 billion people — could also be disrupted by mid-century.
The rapid melting of mountain glaciers has already "strongly affected the water cycle", an essential source for two billion people that could "create or exacerbate tensions over water resources.

'Fault lines'

As the warming planet expands habitable zones for mosquitoes and other disease-carrying species, the world's population could be exposed to vector-borne pathogens such as dengue, yellow fever and Zika virus by mid-century.
Risks posed by malaria and Lyme disease are set to rise, and child deaths from diarrhoea are on track to increase until at least mid-century, despite greater socioeconomic development in high-incidence countries.
Climate change will increase the burden of non-communicable illnesses.
Diseases associated with poor air quality and exposure to ozone, such as lung and heart conditions, will "rise substantially".
There will also be increased risks of food and water-related contamination" by marine toxins.
Covid has made the fault lines in our health systems extremely visible.

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