Big Impacts

We're all in this together

Climate change will affect everyone, but its affecting poor people in developing countries first and most dramatically. People's income, health and lives are already being threatened by climate change. Climate change affects the worlds poorest in the following ways:

Humanitarian Disasters

Clean Water

Food Supplies

Illness

Conflict

More humanitarian disasters:

• The average number of disasters reported during 2000–2004 was 55 per cent higher than during 1995–1999 and affected one third more people
• By 2025, more than half the population in the developing world will be highly vulnerable to floods and storms
• There will be more droughts during the 21st century

Access to clean water will change:

• As rainfall patterns have changed, droughts have been experienced in Papua New Guinea, the Federated States of Micronesia and Fiji. Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Cook islands have experienced water shortages
• The flows of some of Asia's major rivers such as the Tigris, Euphrates, Indus and Brahmaputra are projected to fall by as much as a quarter by 2050 - affecting the lives of more than a billion people across Asia
• The Himalayan glaciers have retreated by 67 per cent since 1990. Further glacial melt could increase summer river flow and floods over coming decades and in the longer term dramatically reduce water flows as glaciers permanently retreat
• In the Nile region, most scenarios estimate a decrease in river flow of up to 75 per cent by 2100, displacing up to 90 million people by 2015

Food supplies and livelihoods will be at risk:

• Crop gardens on six of Tuvalu's eight islands have been damaged by rising sea levels and more severe storms. Export cash crops such as copra, coffee and sugarcane are also highly vulnerable to damage by heat, salination and severe weather
• If climate change is not averted, an additional 80–120 million people will be at risk of hunger. 70–80 per cent of these people will be in Africa, the majority likely to be women
• Crop yields in sub Saharan Africa are projected to fall by 20 per cent with ongoing climate change - in an area already suffering food shortages

Greater risk of illness:

• Five million serious illnesses and 150,000 deaths already occur every year directly as a result of climate change
• People's resistance to disease can be weakened by heat stress, water shortages and malnutrition. Increases in air pollution will lead to a rise in respiratory illnesses. Infectious mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever will spread
• The impact of climate change on water supplies is likely to increase cases of diarrhoea which already claims the lives of nearly 2 million children a year

Greater risk of conflict and more people on the move:

• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (IPCC) suggests there will be 150 million environmental refugees by 2050 and the International Organisation for Migration estimates that eventually one billion people could be displaced from their original home
• As climate change hits, some people will have to leave their country as is already happening in the pacific; others will move within their national borders
• Loss of food and water security will lead to increased conflict. In Kenya, conflict has been triggered by water and food shortages as people find themselves dealing with unprecedented famine