Areas most at risk from climate change
The UK Guardian newspaper reports that an international team of climate scientists has identified the geographic regions most at risk from catastrophic climate change in the coming 100 years.
“Although the scientists cannot be sure precisely when each region will reach the point of no return, their assessment warns it may already be too late to save Arctic sea ice and the Greenland ice sheet, which they regard as the most immediately in peril. By some estimates, there will not be any sea ice in the summer months within 25 years.
The next most vulnerable area is the Amazon rainforest, where reduced rainfall threatens to claim large areas of trees that will not re-establish themselves. The scientists also expressed concerns over the Boreal forests in the north, and have predicted that El Niño, the climate system which has a profound impact on weather from Africa to North America, will become more intense. The scientists are so concerned they have called for an early warning system to monitor each of these fragile ecosystems.
The international team, whose study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, represents some of the world’s most prestigious organisations, including the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, the University of East Anglia and Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute. The scientists polled 52 environmental experts and combined their responses with discussions among 36 leading climate researchers at a workshop at the British embassy in Berlin. Each was asked to rank regions at greatest risk of climate change in the next century.
“There’s a perception that global warming is something that will happen smoothly into the future, but some of these ecosystems go into an abrupt decline when warming reaches a certain threshold,” said Tim Lenton, an environmental scientist at the University of East Anglia and lead author of the study.
“If we know when the different tipping points are, we can use them to inform targets to limit global warming. It gives us something to aim for,” he added.”