The human cost of failure to check climate change will be so unimaginably enormous that top WHO official Maria Neira is reluctant to be drawn into details.
But the little she can reveal is harrowing.
“It is not just about polar bears,” Ms Neira, WHO’s deputy director for environment, climate change and health, told The National on the sidelines of the Cop27 summit in Egypt.
Already, she said, seven million people are dying each year of climate change-related causes, a number certain to grow if the rapid climate deterioration is not arrested.
“We have an emergency plan to deal with a worst-case scenario. But we don’t think we should publicise it. We don’t even want to accept that we may need it. It’s dramatic enough as it is now,” she said.
Her comments came as a series of alarming reports on the pace of climate change were released during the two-week climate conference being held in Egypt's Sharm El Sheikh.
Some of these reports said keeping the world's temperature at 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by 2030 was possibly unattainable. Others said greenhouse gas emissions in industrialised nations were rising and fossil fuel company emissions were underreported, while they rake in huge profits.
The 1.5°C cap was agreed in Paris in 2015, but some countries see it as so detrimental to their national interest that they don’t want it mentioned at the conference, delegates says. That includes US climate envoy John Kerry.
Ms Neira said: “We expect unrest and conflict arising from the fight for food and water. We also expect massive displacement and overflowing hospitals. We don’t even want to imagine it.”
Already, some of these things are happening, albeit on a small scale.
Africa has climate refugees in the Horn of Africa region and Sudan. A third of Pakistan is under water after floods in August. Farmers in California are abandoning their land because of persistent drought. Small islands around the world, particularly in the Pacific, face a realistic threat of disappearing.
“If you accelerate the transition to renewable energy, we will be able to reduce the seven million killed every year by climate change and the resultant pollution,” said Ms Neira.
“If they work to keep the temperature below 1.5°C, we can be sure that the benefit would be enormous. If they don’t, people’s health will be at risk. We hope that Cop27 will act with the urgency that matches the magnitude of the climate crisis.
“The health argument we try to inject into the process of fighting climate change should accelerate and raise the level of ambition in the negotiations.”
START-UPS%20IN%20BATCH%204%20OF%20SANABIL%20500'S%20ACCELERATOR%20PROGRAMME
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COMPANY%20PROFILE
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WHAT IS A BLACK HOLE?
1. Black holes are objects whose gravity is so strong not even light can escape their pull
2. They can be created when massive stars collapse under their own weight
3. Large black holes can also be formed when smaller ones collide and merge
4. The biggest black holes lurk at the centre of many galaxies, including our own
5. Astronomers believe that when the universe was very young, black holes affected how galaxies formed
BELGIUM%20SQUAD
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Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
COMPANY%20PROFILE
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FROM%20THE%20ASHES
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Advocate at Al Bahar & Associate Advocates and Legal Consultants, established in 1994
Education: Mr Al Bahar was born in 1979 and graduated in 2008 from the Judicial Institute. He took after his father, who was one of the first Emirati lawyers
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