Climate change ‘kills 315,000 a year’

CLIMATE change kills about 315,000 people a year through hunger, sickness and weather disasters, and the annual death toll is expected to rise to 500,000 by 2030, a report said yesterday.

The study, commissioned by the Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum (GHF), estimates that climate change seriously affects 325 million people every year, a number that will more than double in 20 years to 10% of the world’s population (now about 6.7 billion).

Economic losses due to global warming amount to more than $125 billion (€88.4bn) annually — more than the flow of aid from rich to poor nations — and are expected to rise to $340bn (€240bn) each year by 2030, according to the report.

“Climate change is the greatest emerging humanitarian challenge of our time, causing suffering to hundreds of millions of people worldwide,” Kofi Annan, former UN secretary-general and GHF president, said.

“The first hit and worst affected are the world’s poorest groups, and yet they have done least to cause the problem.”

The report says developing countries bear more than nine-tenths of the human and economic burden of climate change, while the 50 poorest countries contribute less than 1% of the carbon emissions that are heating up the planet.

Annan urged governments due to meet at UN talks in Copenhagen in December to agree on an effective, fair and binding global pact to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, the world’s main mechanism for tackling global warming.