Climate change - An Overview
Climate change is with us. Sea levels are rising, ice is melting, temperatures are increasing, and the consequences are major This is not “just” about polar bears and pandas anymore, it’s about us humans and our survival. We need to act now and 2009 needs to be remembered as the year the world found an answer to climate change.
What is climate change?
We know the world is warming, global average temperature has increased by 0.74°C during the past century, with most of that since 1970.Human-made CO2 is responsible for the vast majority of the warming. Concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere are now almost 40 per cent above those of 200 years ago and emissions to the atmosphere have been rising by more than 2 per cent a year since 2000. This extra greenhouse gas stems overwhelmingly from humans burning fossil fuels and destroying forests, both of which contain carbon, which gets released as CO2 in the atmosphere.
Climate change will increasingly cause storms, droughts, floods and fires and have severe impacts on food production, water availability and ecosystems such as forests and wetlands. A major concern is how rapidly climate change will magnify existing environmental stresses and contribute to food insecurity, conflict over resources, and loss of livelihood for millions of people.
Certain regions will be worse affected than others. Global warming is expected to be greatest over land and at high northern latitudes. The Arctic, Sub Saharan Africa, small islands and the big river deltas of Asia will be most seriously affected. These regions house some of the poorest populations on earth, who are the least well equipped to deal with the consequences of climate change.
