North Carolina’s coastlands, like coastal areas around the world, are
threatened by rising sea levels caused by human-induced climate change.
Yet in 2012, land developers convinced the state legislature to bar the
use of scientific evidence on rising sea levels in the state’s coastal
management policies, at least until 2016.
The issue is equally
flagrant at the federal level: US Congress members, on the take from Big
Oil, simply deny the reality of climate change.
The bad news
about mega-droughts and freshwater scarcity stretches from Brazil to
California to conflict-ridden countries in the Middle East.
Sao
Paulo’s metropolitan region of 20 million people is now on the verge of
water rationing, an unprecedented threat for one of the world’s leading
cities. In California, this winter has been another dry season in a
bitter four-year drought, one of the most severe in the region’s
history. In Iran, the Hamoun wetlands bordering Afghanistan are
disappearing, posing a grave threat to the local population.
The
global message is clear: the world’s growing population (now at 7.3
billion, but likely to reach eight billion by 2024 and nine billion by
around 2040), human-induced climate change, and the overuse of
freshwater for irrigation and urban needs (especially when cities are
built up in dry regions) are all fueling the potential for catastrophe.
Recent
research indicates that these trends are likely to intensify. Almost
all studies of human-induced climate change show that the Mediterranean
region is likely to experience a further significant decline in
rainfall, compounding the drying trend that has occurred during the past
quarter-century.
Likewise, a recent study by my colleagues at
Columbia University’s Earth Institute has shown that human-induced
climate change is likely to cause increasingly frequent mega-droughts in
the American southwest and Great Plains states in the second half of
this century.
In September of this year, world leaders will gather
at the United Nations to adopt a set of Sustainable Development Goals
(SDG) to address these rising threats. The SDGs will not ensure global
action, but, as US President John F. Kennedy once said about UN
agreements, they can serve as a lever to help move the world toward
action. That is why it is so important to start planning for the SDGs
now.
Read more: Why we can’t avert our eyes from climate change | Shanghai Daily
