Climate Change and the fight for resources will set world aflame

[RestoreGore]

http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2686846.ece

By Steve Bloomfield in Nairobi
Published: 21 June 2007

Climate change has become a major security issue that could lead to "a world going up in flames", the United Nations' top environment official has warned. From rising sea levels in the Indian Ocean to the increasing spread of desert in Africa's Sahel region, global warming will cause new wars across the world, said Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

"People are being pushed into other people's terrain by the changing climate and it is leading to conflict," he said. "Societies are not prepared for the scale and the speed with which they will have to decide what they will do with people."

The world was already experiencing its first war partly caused by climate change, he said. Dramatic changes to the environment in the Darfur region of Sudan helped lay the ground for today's conflict which has displaced more than 2.5 million people and killed at least 200,000.

A report to be published by UNEP tomorrow will make a direct link between climate change and the Darfur conflict. "It will be one of the most significant documents in terms of linking environment change and conflict," Mr Steiner said. "It will say that climate change is now a key dimension that must be considered in conflict issues."

The roots of the four-year conflict can be found in the devastating drought that swept Sudan and the Horn of Africa in the 1980s, the report will say. Since then, rainfall in Sudan has fallen by 40 per cent, a result, claim scientists, of global warming. Farmers began to fence off land to which nomads once had access. Clashes over shrinking resources between nomads, who tend to be Arab, and the mainly African farmers became widespread.

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Africa does not emit GHGs at any rate palpable, yet it is the continent that is suffering and will suffer most for our inability to understand the urgency of what we face in the coming years. This surely is THE issue for humanity, and this world is nowhere near ready to handle the refugees it will bring us. This goes beyond any one election in this or any country as Al Gore also reiterated in interviews previously. However, making people see that is really the challenge now, and we simply are running out of time to deal with this crisis properly.

There are already effects such as glacial melt which we cannot stop, and deforestation, desertification, population increases, water scaricity, and those areas we can control are overcome by waste, greed and moral deafness. I am trying to stay hopeful and hope that Live Earth will awaken more people to get up themselves to do what must be done, but I have to admit that there are days when my hope fades.

[RestoreGore]

1. KICK

Earth...Earth...Earth.

[Stargazer99]

2. Unbridled capitalism and Corporate America

See what happens when you don't control corporations!