11 June 2009 | Luca Del Buono

 

Climate change will aggravate natural disasters and people in developing nations such as Dominica, Vanuatu, Myanmar and Guatemala are most at risk, a U.N.-backed study showed Thursday.

It urged governments to invest hundreds of billions of dollars to curb mounting impacts of hazards such as cyclones, floods, droughts, landslides, earthquakes and tsunamis.

"Risk is ... felt most acutely by people living in poor rural areas and slums," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon wrote in the report, issued on the sidelines of June 1-12 U.N. climate talks in Bonn working on a new treaty to combat global warming.

"Climate change will magnify the uneven distribution of risk, skewing disaster impacts even further toward poor communities in developing countries," the Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction said.Andrew Maskrey, lead author of the report, said that developing countries with big populations -- led by China, India, Bangladesh and Indonesia -- suffered the most fatalities from natural disasters.

"But you also have to look at it in relative terms -- the proportion of the population at risk," he told a news conference.

By that yardstick, those at risk were "mainly small countries -- many small islands ... and small countries."The list was topped by Dominica in the Caribbean, Vanuatu in the Pacific along with Myanmar and Guatemala.

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Source: Reuters

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