Climate change and S Asia
March 27, 2008 at 11:58 am (Greening India)
The BBC reports on a new report from Greenpeace on the challenge faced by India, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
It estimates that 75 million people from Bangladesh will lose their homes.It predicts that about 45 million people in India will also become “climate migrants”.
[...]
“Most of these people will be forced to leave their homes because of the sea-level rise and drought associated with shrinking water supplies and monsoon variability. The bulk of them will come from Bangladesh as most of the parts of that country will be inundated,” Dr Sudhir Chella Rajan, a climate expert and author of the study, told the BBC.
[...]
Several large cities within the low elevation coastal zone like Bombay (Mumbai) and Madras will go under the sea if the present growth rate of greenhouse emissions continue.
Greenpeace could well be right in the estimate. The solution for this is however, what Schelling proposes. He says, “The sooner Malaysia can become like Singapore, the sooner it can worry less about the impact of climate change on health, comfort, and productivity.”
In this sense, the sooner Bangladesh can grow economically, build better infrastructure and create new cities inland to support this migration the lower the impact will be. This is the same for India and Pakistan too.
Coal power or no power « World is Green said,
April 10, 2008 at 8:00 am
[...] is an important argument. The capacity to fight and adapt to climate change is dependent on the ability of nations to develop economically. And to develop economically, we need to have cheap and abundant [...]