Scary stuff from CTVWarming temperatures could result in food shortages for 130 million people by 2050 and threaten to cause drought and higher seas in Australia and New Zealand by 2030, according to a UN report released Tuesday.
The climatic changes threaten ecologically rich sites like the Great Barrier Reef and sub-Antarctic islands, according to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
A summary of the full, 1,572-page document written and reviewed by 441 scientists was released Friday. The latest document, the second of four reports including the summary, tries to explain how global warming is changing life on Earth.
Further details were unveiled Tuesday in a series of regional press conferences around the world.
The report suggests that a 3.6-degree increase in mean air temperature could decrease rain-fed rice yields by 5 percent to 12 percent in China. In Bangladesh, rice production may fall by just under 10 percent and wheat by a third by the year 2050.
The drops in yields combined with rising populations could put close to 50 million extra people at risk of hunger by 2020, an additional 132 million by 2050 and 266 million by 2080, the report said.
"Unchecked climate change will be an environmental and economic catastrophe but above all it will be a human tragedy," Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, said in a statement. More
No comments:
Post a Comment