Climate Change Causes 300,000 Deaths Every Year, Says Former UN Secretary-General

Posted on 01. Jun, 2009 by Ross in Climate Change

Climate change is not just something which will wreak devastation in the future: it is already killing 300,000 people a year right now, according to a think-tank set up by former UN secretary general Kofi Annan.

Annan’s organisation, the Global Humanitarian Forum, undertook the most comprehensive study of the impact of climate change on human populations. 300 million people are already being effected and economic losses due to the environmental phenomenon already cost the world’s economy $125 billion every year.

In summarising the report’s content, the Global Humanitarian Forum’s CEO Walter Fust wrote:

Humanitarian action has its roots in war and conflict relief, while development was largely a response to decades of asymmetric colonial exploitation. Today, we have moved into a phase where natural and environmental disasters are causing more damage than war.

The medium-term predictions don’t make for happy reading either. By 2030, the annual death-toll is set to rise to 500,000: most of the deaths being directly caused by increasingly severe heatwaves, floods, storms and forest fires. 4 billion people are at risk of civil and political instability brought on by increasing levels of poverty, famine and disease as a result of climatic shifts, massively increasing the likelihood of war. The economic costs are expected to balloon to $600 billion per year.

Climate change-induced migration is predicted to affect an extra 75 million people, with the worst hit regions in Africa (especially Egypt and the sub-Saharan zone) and Bangladesh, as well as coastal and forest regions. Adaptation strategies, once derided for being too pessimistic, are now becoming a major worldwide political focus as the approach to climate change is now one of minimisation and mitigation rather than total avoidance.

With large numbers of simple opportunities to lessen the impact on carbon dioxide emissions on national, corporate and domestic levels such as energy efficiency and renewable energy, there need still exists to take bold positive action now to prevent such dire predictions coming to fruition or worsening further.