There is no equity when it comes to who is most affected most by climate change, researchers said Tuesday, as a pair of new reports were unveiled, highlighting who will suffer the most as a result of the record “hot and wild” climate as well as the “increasingly visible human footprint on extreme weather.”
“We just had the hottest five-year period on record, with 2015 claiming the title of hottest individual year. Even that record is likely to be beaten in 2016,” declared Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which released its five-year study of the global climate to attendees of the 22nd Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), also known as COP22, which is being held in Marrakesh, Morrocco this week.
While that information wasn’t necessarily new, the study also found that these record temperatures and other indicators—rising sea levels, as well as declines in Arctic sea-ice extent, glaciers, and snow cover—further confirm that human activity is to blame for change.
What’s more, The Global Climate 2011-2015 (pdf) also determined that more than half of the extreme weather events recorded during that time “had their likelihood of occurring substantially enhanced by human-induced climate change.” In some cases, the probability of extreme heat increased by a factor of 10 or more.
Among the “high-impact events” highlighted in the report are:
As delegates are meeting to discuss a global “rule book” for implementing the Paris climate agreement, the long-term study underscored the urgency of those negotiations, particularly for individuals living in the global south and other high-risk areas.
“The distribution of climatic events is not fair,” said Sonke Kreft, lead author of the Global Climate Risk Index 2017 (pdf), which was also unveiled at COP22 Tuesday.
The annual study, performed by Bonn-based risk analysts Germanwatch, found that of the 10 countries most affected by extreme weather events between 1995-2014, “nine were developing countries in the low income or lower-middle income country group, while only one (Thailand) was classified as an upper-middle income country.” The hardest hit countries were Honduras, Myanmar, and Haiti.
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