Burma, second worst-hit by climate change: Report

by Mungpi
Wednesday, 09 December 2009 22:51

New Delhi (Mizzima) - Military-ruled Burma is the second worst country affected by extreme weather caused by climate change, a Berlin-based Climate Watchdog said in a new report that assesses the impact of global warming in nearly two decades.

Germanwatch, in its new report titled ‘Global Climate Risk Index’, released on Tuesday at the United Nations Conference on Climate in Copenhagen, said Bangladesh, Burma and Honduras are countries most affected by extreme weather events from 1990 to 2008.

The group said, poor countries or less developed countries are found to have suffered the worst from the effects of climate change in the period that the report covers.

“Among the 10 countries most affected, there is not one developed country,” said the report.

“Poorer developing countries are often hit much harder. These results underscore the particular vulnerability of poor countries to climatic risks, despite the fact that absolute monetary damages are much higher in richer countries,” the report added.

In addition to Burma and Bangladesh, the report puts four other Asian countries - Vietnam, India, the Philippines and China - among the 10 worst affected countries by climate change.

The group also ranked Burma as the world’s worst affected country in 2008 because of the deadly Cyclone Nargis that devastated Burma’s Irrawaddy delta in May 2008, killing and displacing tens of thousands of people.

The report puts the death toll caused by Cyclone Nargis at 85,000 and the damage at an estimated US $ 4 billion. But the UN estimates that over 134,000 people died and went missing, and over 2.4 million lives were devastated.

“The huge number of fatalities in Myanmar [Burma] were caused by Cyclone Nargis and revealed the low adaptive capacity of the country which, however, is also a result of the political failure to embark upon serious disaster preparedness,” the report said.

The report notes that during the nearly 20-year period it covers, almost 600,000 people died in more than 11,000 extreme weather events, causing losses of $1.7 trillion.