Nearly half of the global population – between 3.3 and 3.6 billion people – lives in areas highly vulnerable to climate change. The brief window in which to limit how intense and frequent climate impacts such as stronger storms, droughts, flooding and sea-level rise become and to secure “a liveable and sustainable future for all” is rapidly narrowing.
So says a new report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which confirms what social movements have been saying for decades. How vulnerable you are to the impacts of climate change depends on how poor you are, your status in society and the legacies of colonialism.
The report, which reviewed 34,000 studies, recognised that heatwaves and storms have made access to nutritious food and clean water less secure. This disproportionately the case in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, small islands and the Arctic.
