World’s poorest will feel brunt of climate change

Droughts, floods, heatwaves, sea-level rises and fiercer storms. The scenario is daunting. And it’s all due to the warming of the Earth as a result of climate change. What’s even more daunting is that it will cause severe hardship in areas that are already poor or were emerging from poverty.

The World Bank issued this warning in a report, urging rich industrialised countries to cut their emissions.

Food shortages will be among the first consequences within just two decades, along with damage to cities from fiercer storms and migration as people try to escape the effects.

In sub-Saharan Africa, increasing droughts and excessive heat are likely to mean that within about 20 years the staple crop maize will no longer thrive in about 40% of current farmland. In other parts of the region rising temperatures will kill or degrade swathes of the savanna used to graze livestock, according to the report, Turn down the heat: climate extremes, regional impacts and the case for resilience.

In south-east Asia, events such as the devastating floods in Pakistan in 2010, which affected 20mn people, could become commonplace, while changes to the monsoon could bring severe hardship to Indian farmers.

Warming of at least 2C (36F) regarded by scientists as the limit of safety beyond which changes to the climate are likely to become catastrophic and irreversible is all but inevitable on current levels, and the efforts of governments are limited to trying to prevent temperature rises passing over this threshold. But many parts of the world are already experiencing severe challenges as a result of climate change, and this will intensify as temperatures rise.

Jim Yong Kim, the bank’s president, warned that climate change should not be seen as a future problem that could be put off: “The scientists tell us that if the world warms by 2C warming which may be reached in 20 to 30 years that will cause widespread food shortages, unprecedented heatwaves, and more intense cyclones.”

Climate change is taken seriously across the world. US mayors have pledged to make their communities more resilient to increasingly severe floods, droughts, extreme storms and wildfires. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced a $20bn plan to prepare his city for rising sea levels and hotter summers.

President Barack Obama will target carbon emissions from power plants as part of a second-term climate change agenda expected to be rolled out in the next few weeks.

Obama will take several steps to make tackling climate change a “second-term priority” that builds on first-term policies.

Nasa is enlisting the help of smartphone users around the world to monitor the effect of clouds on the Earth’s climate. Information collected by users of the CloudSpotter app - where people take pictures of clouds and try to identify their type - will be used by the space agency’s scientists to calibrate its Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System instrument.

Urgent action is needed not only to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also to help countries prepare for a world of dramatic climate and weather extremes.