Archive for November 13th, 2013

Haiti, Philippines hardest hit by weather extremes in 2012: study

Reuters: Haiti, the Philippines and Pakistan were hardest hit by weather disasters in 2012, a report issued at U.N. climate talks on Tuesday showed, as the death toll mounted from the latest typhoon to devastate the Philippines. Germanwatch, a think-tank partly funded by the German government, said poor nations had suffered most from extreme weather in the past two decades, and worldwide, extreme weather had killed 530,000 people and caused damage of more than $2.5 trillion. "The unfolding human tragedy...

Developing nations bear the brunt of extreme weather

SciDevNet: Haiti, the Philippines and Pakistan were the countries that suffered the most due to extreme weather events in 2012, according to the Global Climate Risk Index released yesterday at the UN Climate Change Conference in Warsaw, Poland. The 2012 events that hit these countries and, so explain their high ranking were Hurricane Sandy in Haiti, Typhoon Bopha in the Philippines, and severe monsoon flooding in Pakistan. "We have lost almost US$15 billion to floods and droughts in the last three years and...

Satellite imagery shows before & after devastation

Telegraph: Satellite images of Tacloban taken before and after Typhoon Haiyan destroyed much of the city have shown how the city in the Philippines has been flattened. Several hours before the typhoon hit, DigitalGlobe -- a Colorado-based company that provides high resolution images from its own satellites to mapping agencies, defence contractors and governments -- switched on its cameras above the city of Tacloban. The city of 200,000 people was teeming with life. Roads were thick with lorries and cars....

The Inequality of Climate Change

New York Times: Typhoon Haiyan has left an estimated 10,000 dead and hundreds of thousands homeless in the Philippines. And it has once again underscored for many development experts a cruel truth about climate change: It will hit the world’s poorest the hardest. “No nation will be immune to the impacts of climate change,” said a major World Bank report on the issue last year. “However, the distribution of impacts is likely to be inherently unequal and tilted against many of the world’s poorest regions, which have...