Experts meet over second IPCC report

By Henry Neondo

The world's leading scientific experts are to gather in Brussels on April 6, 2007 to launch the second volume of the United Nation's Fourth Assessment Report, which addresses climate impacts, adaptation and vulnerability.

The report is expected to portray a bleak future for the world's poorest countries, which have done least to pollute the atmosphere.Despite the negligible historical emissions of greenhouse gases by the least developed countries, their people will suffer most from climate change, as they are the most vulnerable to the impacts and least able to adapt.

The second volume of the Fourth Assessment Report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Working Group II provides the starkest warning yet on the threat of global climate change and predicts the severe consequences the planet will face unless world leaders take urgent action to cut emissions of greenhouse gases.

Friends of the Earth International's Climate Campaigner, Catherine Pearce, said: "The scientific findings are stronger than ever. This report is likely to confirm that not only are we seeing the impacts of climate change around us already, but worse is yet to come and the world's poorest people are being hardest hit.

"The industrialised world, including the USA, must lead the way by making significant cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions and helping less developed countries to develop sustainable, low-carbon economies.

"Current efforts on adaptation, including available funds, are clearly inadequate to meet the scale of what is required. Urgent assistance is needed for those developing countries, which have done nothing to contribute to the current threat of climate change and are already facing the devastating effects."

"In Bali this December, industrialised countries must also agree a more effective and stronger second round to the Kyoto agreement on climate change which starts in 2013.”
The UN report - the second of a series based on the latest scientific literature - analyses how climate change is affecting natural and human systems, what the impacts will be and how far adaptation and mitigation can reduce the impacts.

The report, which has taken six years to compile, draws on research by 2,500 scientists from over 130 countries and should shock the world into taking urgent action to reduce global emissions.

Government delegates from more than 100 countries are expected to agree that hundreds of millions of people are vulnerable to flooding due to sea level rise, especially in densely populated and low-lying settlements which already face other challenges, such as tropical storms.

The UN report is also expected to warn that projected climate change is likely to affect millions of people through increases in malnutrition, deaths, disease and injury due to heat waves, floods, storms, fires and droughts.

Worryingly, scientists are also expected to state that over the next half-century it is very likely that climate change will impede the achievement of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals.