Calls for world leaders to collaborate to boost poorer countries' resilience to climate change have grown louder in the wake of new findings that underline the devastating impact storms, floods, heat waves, and other climate-related extreme weather events are having on nations across the world.
The latest edition of Germanwatch's Global Climate Risk Index, published this morning, confirms that vulnerable people in developing economies continued to suffer the most from the impacts climate change in 2019, with Mozambique, Zimbabwe, the Bahamas, Japan, and Malawi identified as the countries most affected by climate change that year.
With the severity and frequency of such tropical cyclones predicted to increase as global temperatures rise, Germanwatch has urged world leaders attending this week's Climate Adaptation Summit to take urgent action to enhance vulnerable countries' resilience to extreme weather events.
Developing countries are particularly affected by the impacts of climate change, the NGO warned, because they are more vulnerable to damaging effects of a hazard, in addition to having lower coping capacity.
"The global pandemic has reiterated the fact that vulnerable countries are exposed to various types of risk - climatic, geophysical, economic and health-related - and that vulnerability is systemic and interconnected," said Germanwatch's Laura Schaefer. "It is therefore important to address these interconnections. Strengthening the climate resilience of countries is a crucial part of this challenge."
The Global Climate Risk Index, which ranks countries by combining a number of metrics, including financial losses and human casualties caused by extreme weather events, ranks the countries most affected by climate change during 2019, as well as the countries that have been historically most affected between 2000 and 2019.
Eight out of the 10 countries most affected by the quantified impacts of extreme weather events over the last 20 years are in the low- to lower-middle income category, and half are Least Developed Countries (LDCs), with Puerto Rico, Myanmar, Haiti, Philippines, and Mozambique identified as having been hardest hit.
However, the findings also detail how richer countries are similarly seeing climate impacts escalate, with European countries scoring high on fatalities due to more frequent summer heatwaves and winter floods. The UK is ranked the 102nd worst affected country in 2019, however it is ranked 18th over 2000-2019 for fatalities and is the 20th worst affected country when it comes financial losses.
Germanwatch urged leaders of industrialised nations to step up their efforts to meet their Paris Agreement commitment to mobilise $100bn of climate finance a year for developed countries from 2020 onwards so as to help vulerable countries curb emissions and enhance their resilience to future climate impacts.
"The Global Climate Risk Index shows that poor vulnerable countries face particularly great challenges in dealing with the consequences of extreme weather events," said David Eckstein of Germanwatch. "They urgently need financial and technical assistance. Therefore, it is concerning that recent studies show that the 100 billion dollars per year pledged by the industrialised nations will first not be reached, and second that only a small proportion of this has been provided for climate adaptation."
Viet Nam is one of the 6 countries most heavily impacted by extreme weather phenomena in the past decade, according to a report released by Germanwatch – a German environmental organisation.
The Global Climate Risk Index 2020 (CRI) report announced at the ongoing 25th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Madrid, Spain, Viet Nam has worsened from 9th spot in the CRI 2019, which reviewed 1998 to 2017, to 6th in 2018 on the global vulnerability ladder.
Source: Businessgreen
