Climate change reports

The 12th United Nations Conference on Climate Change opened in Nairobi, Kenya this past week. The focus of the conference is on helping developing countries adapt to global warming. Several recently released reports predict that Africa would suffer the most from climate change, mainly from rising sea levels that would flood coastal cities and droughts that would ruin crop yields.

Mapping Climate Vulnerability and Poverty in Africa by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) shows the locations of African communities likely to be most vulnerable to the double threats of climate change and poverty. These include the mixed arid-semiarid systems in the Sahel, arid-semiarid rangeland systems in parts of eastern Africa, the systems in the Great Lakes region of eastern Africa, the coastal regions of eastern Africa, and many of the drier zones of southern Africa. The ILRI also contributed to the British Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. This year's United Nations Human Development Report, Beyond scarcity: Power, poverty and the global water crisis, also addresses climate change in the context of water supply.

The UN estimates that, in the next 25 years, the number of people living in water-stressed countries will rise from around 800 million to 3 billion people. In HOORC's Library, you can find The No-Nonsense Guide to Climate Change, Climate Affairs: a Primer, and The Discovery of Global Warming.