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India loses more people to climate change than any other country
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| The Pioneer , Saturday, December 06, 2008 |
| Correspondent
: IANS | Poland |
| Between 1998 and 2007, India has lost more people due to extreme weather events caused by climate change than any other country, with an average of 4,532 people killed every year, a well-known German NGO has calculated. The monetary losses were an average of $ 12 billion a year in terms of purchasing power parity, representing 0.62 per cent of India’s GDP, added Sven Harmeling of Germanwatch on Thursday.
Releasing his findings on the sidelines of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) summit in this western Poland town, Harmeling said if one took into account average death, deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, average total losses and average losses as percentage of GDP, India would rank seventh among countries most affected by extreme weather events in the last decade.
Germanwatch had created an index with these four factors, by which Honduras was the country worst affected in the last decade, followed by Bangladesh. The benchmark Fourth Assessment Report brought out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 had said extreme weather events such as more frequent and more severe droughts, floods and storms were strongly correlated to climate change caused by global warming.
Harmeling said 2,502 Indians had been killed by extreme weather events in 2007 alone. But other countries had suffered worse, which placed India 19th among the list of countries affected last year.
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Saturday, 06 December 2008 |
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