El
Niño could leave 4 million people in Pacific without food or
drinking water
Papua
New Guinea drought has already claimed two dozen lives and looming El
Niño weather pattern could be as severe as in 1997-98, when 23,000
people died
Ben Doherty
Monday 12 October
2015 01.19 BST
Two dozen people
have already died from hunger and drinking contaminated water in
drought-stricken Papua New Guinea, but the looming El Niño crisis
could leave more than four million people across the Pacific without
enough food or clean water.
The El Niño weather
pattern – when waters in the eastern tropical Pacific ocean become
warmer, driving extreme weather conditions – may be as severe as in
1997-98, when an estimated 23,000 people died, forecasters believe.
Record El Niño set
to cause hunger for 10 million poorest, Oxfam warns
Read more
In Papua New
Guinea’s Chimbu province in the highlands region, a prolonged
drought has been exacerbated by sudden and severe frosts which have
killed off almost all crops. The provincial disaster centre has
confirmed 24 people have died from starvation and drinking
contaminated water.
Provincial disaster
co-ordinator Michael Ire Appa told RadioNZ he feared the death toll
could even be higher.
“The drought has
been here for almost three months now and in areas that were affected
by the drought there’s a serious food shortage, including water,
and some of the districts have not reported, so there may be more
[deaths] than that,” he said.
Two highlands
provinces have already declared a state of emergency.
Oxfam Australia’s
climate change policy advisor Dr Simon Bradshaw said many parts of
PNG would run out of food in two or three months, but in some areas
there was as little as a month’s food left, and few ways to get
more in.
“In the highland
areas people are almost exclusively reliant on subsistence farming,
farming of sweet potatoes. We do know that water is becoming very
scarce, that’s of course impacting food production, and PNG is
almost entirely dependent on its own food – I think 83% of its food
is produced in-country – so any hit on food production poses
immediate challenges in terms of food security.”
Over the coming
months, the El Niño pattern will bring more rain, flooding and
higher sea levels to countries near the equator, raising the risk of
inundation for low-lying atolls already feeling the impacts of
climate change.
At the same time,
the countries of the Pacific south-west – which have larger
populations – will be significantly drier and hotter.
El Niño years
typically have a longer, more destructive cyclone season.
“El Niño has the
potential to trigger a regional humanitarian emergency and we
estimate as many as 4.1 million people are at risk from water
shortages, food insecurity and disease across the Pacific,” Sune
Gudnitz, head of the Pacific region office of the United Nations
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.
“Countries
including Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Tonga and the Solomon Islands are
already feeling El Niño’s impact with reduced rainfall affecting
crops and drinking-water supplies. Drought conditions would further
complicate the humanitarian situation in countries that are just
emerging from the devastation caused by tropical cyclones Pam, Maysak
and Raquel.”
Many countries
across the region are entering the El Niño period in a vulnerable
state. Drought has been officially declared in 34 provinces in
Indonesia, while in Vanuatu – still recovering from the devastation
of cyclone Pam, which struck in March – authorities are warning
reduced rainfall will damage food security, health and livelihoods.
In some parts of
Fiji, water is already being trucked into villages that have run out.
And Tonga, which has suffered a drought for nearly a year, has been
forced to ship water supplies to the country’s outer islands.
Countries where food
insecurity affects large proportions of the population were of
special concern, Bradshaw said.
“With an El Niño
event, you usually get about one-fifth less rainfall across the
country as well as significant changes to the timing of the rainy
season, a lot more rain concentrated in January, and that, combined
with deforestation, increases the risk of landslides, flash floods,
damage to infrastructure and destruction of crops. Timor Leste is
somewhere we’re watching particularly closely because of the
existing challenges, and the effect the El Niño will have on top of
that.”
Bradshaw said the
impact of the El Niño would compound the difficulties faced by
Pacific countries struggling to cope with the effects of climate
change.
He said recent
research suggested El Niño patterns – usually seen every three to
seven years – could now occur twice as frequently, and that
“normal” conditions might become more similar to those of El
Niño.
“We’ve had two
unusually hot years, and now we’ve got a very strong El Niño
event, so I think it would be fair to say, unfortunately, that we’re
in uncharted waters. What we’ve seen is somewhat unprecedented and
climate change is increasingly going to put us in that position.”
The countries most
affected by the combined effects of climate change and El Nino are –
for reasons of geography, economy, governance and remoteness –
often the least equipped to deal with their impacts.
“We’ve seen an
unprecedented run of extreme and erratic weather, which has had very
real impacts,” Bradshaw said. “Of course, those impacts are felt
first and hardest by the world’s poorest communities, but these
countries are also the least responsible for climate change. They’ve
contributed negligibly to global greenhouse emissions.
“I think it drives
home the fact that climate change affects us all; it affects poorer
countries first and hardest, but we have a responsibility as a
wealthy, developed nation to be both doing far more to reduce our own
emissions, but also to be providing greater support with adaptation
and resilience-building to poorer countries.”
Bradshaw said the
effects of the El Niño, combined with climate change, should drive
all countries towards a strong agreement at climate change talks in
Paris in December.
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