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Climate change as the 'new' security threat

12 Oct 2007

At an African Union summit in early 2007 Yoweri Museveni, the President of Uganda, called climate change an ‘act of aggression’ by the developed world against the developing world and demanded compensation for the damage global warming would cause African nations.7 A couple of months later, Kaire Mbuende, the Namibian representative to the United Nations, called the developed countries’ emissions [...] Basile Ikouébé of Congo-Brazzaville remarked on the irony in the fact that Africa, the region least responsible for global GHG emissions (the average African produces less than a twentieth of the emissions of the average American), is likely to be the worst aff ected by the ‘excess consumption and carefree attitude of the rich’.10 The Ghanaian representative commended the Security Council for hold [...] Climate change and confl ict in Africa The dimensions of climate change in Africa In its 2007 assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stated that ‘Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change and climate variability, a situation aggravated by the interaction of “multiple stresses”, occurring at various levels, and low adaptive capacity’.17 The expected [...] Egypt’s Nile Delta, for example, is one of the most densely populated areas of the world and is extremely vulnerable to sea-level rise.24 Compounding this threat is the predicted exacerbation by climate change of a variety of health problems, leading to more widespread malnutrition and diarrhoeal diseases, and altered distribution of some vectors of disease transmission such as the malarial mosqui [...] The scientifi c basis for climate change is increasingly well established, and there is continuous growth in the amount of research being done on the biophysical impacts of climate change in terms of raised sea levels, altered 20 A. Nyong, ‘Impacts of climate change in the tropics: the African experience’, keynote presentation to sympo- sium on ‘Avoiding dangerous climate change’, London, Met Offi
africa agriculture environment climate change adaptation politics climate global warming water climate change adaptation natural resources climate policy geopolitics international relations national security water resources weather kyoto protocol livestock farming nature climatic changes ghg kyoto natural environment effects of global warming adaptations greenhouse effect, atmospheric united nations framework convention on climate change (unfccc) pastoralism pastoral impact of climate change long-range weather forecasts

Authors

Brown, Oli

Pages
14
Published in
Canada

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