[CAJ note: Perhaps at the UN’s climate unit their motto is, “If at first you don’t succeed try, try again…?”]
Madeleine Coorey
AFP via Yahoo! News
6/6/2010
SYDNEY (AFP) – Weather-related catastrophes brought about by climate change are increasing, the top UN humanitarian official said Sunday as he warned of the possibility of “mega-disasters”.
John Holmes, the UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, said one of the biggest challenges facing the aid community was the problems stemming from changing weather patterns.
“When it comes meteorological disasters, weather-related disasters, then there is a trend upwards connected with climate change,” Holmes, who is in Australia for high-level talks on humanitarian aid, told AFP.
“The trend is there is terms of floods, and cyclones, and droughts.”
Holmes, who is the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, said it had been a tough year due to January’s devastating earthquake in Haiti, which killed more than 250,000 people.
He said while earthquakes, such as the 7.0-magnitude quake which leveled the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, were random, weather-related natural disasters were increasing in number and scale.
“It’s partly the very obvious things like the number of cyclones and the intensity of the cyclones, and the amount of flooding,” he said.
“But is also in slightly more invisible ways — in Africa with drought spreading, desertification spreading.”
The article continues at Yahoo! News.
H/T Climate Depot
