Sunday, January 29, 2023

Why are we hellbent on screwing our environment, particularly in Asia?

Kerry Edwards, we have touched on this subject recently on how the stations in Antarctic monitored by Australia were affected and how your coastal shorelines are behaving in the past couple of months.. Anthony DiMichele and Peggy Marr for residing on the Western Seaboard of North America and Glenn Scherer for being a keen and receptive champion and prophet of Greenhouse Effect dangers.. I have written a post today which may be of interest to all of you.. Please go through this.. The Impact of Global Warming on Asian Manufacturers About a couple of months ago, many delegates had gathered in Doha, Qatar for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It was a conference that went on for a fortnight and saw hundreds of ministers from various countries attending it. The big debate was on whether or not the industrial nations were doing enough on reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. It could be argued that the Asian countries are more likely to suffer economic losses as a result of climate change. Karl Wilson reports in a China Daily that the coastal cities around Asia and China, in particular, are more vulnerable to severe flooding that may affect the growth in economy as well as millions of people. The weather patterns are changing globally. The sea levels are rising as the oceans are getting warmer. The glaciers and the polar ice caps are melting. Floods and droughts have just become more intense. The fashionable thing on the agenda with world ministers nowadays is the global financial crisis; so, thinking about spending many dollars to ward off climate changes is being pushed to the back recesses of the mind. Yet, the world is not going to wait for such ministers to take steps or to think clearly. It is going to get warmer in a hurry and the economic consequences are going to burn many asses. On 18th November of last year, the World Bank reported that the world is hastening down a path to heat up by four degrees Celsius and these four degrees would mean a lot to the poles as they may trigger a cascade of cataclysmic changes that will include severe heat waves raising sea levels affecting millions of people and global food inventory stocks. This report for the World Bank was prepared by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics in Germany and was called `Turn down the Heat’. It emphasized that a warmer planet would be catastrophic. It listed out that the coastal cities would eventually be inundated. The risk for food production would increase. The dry regions would become drier and the wet regions would become wetter. There would be unprecedented heat wave in many regions, particularly in the tropics. There would be an irreversible loss of biodiversity including the coral reef systems. Multinational companies that are operating in the Asian growth economies would be exposed more to these rising environmental risks in the next few decades. The cities listed out with big risks were Dhaka, Manila, Yangon, Bangkok, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Wuhan, Djakarta, Ho Chi Minh City, Hong Kong, Mumbai and Kolkata. These cities would have an impact on account of the sensitivity of their population and a relatively poor capacity of government support to adapt local measures to ward off the potential effects of this rapid climate change. So many Chinese cities being included in this risk list is of great concern to many companies which are using China as a manufacturing base. Already, water stress has become a big risk in China as a result of the industry demands and also because of rapidly swelling urban population. The Director of the World Economic Forum, Thomas Kerr, has mentioned that “avoiding these pessimistic predictions may not be possible as it will require a radical transformation in the way the global economy is functioning and how the countries’ think tanks are strategizing”. It will require loads of rapid uptake of renewable energy with big deployment of carbon dioxide capture, reduction of industrial emissions and a total cessation of deforestation.