Comparada
com as futuras migrações provocadas pelas alterações climáticas,
a presente crise dos refugiados é uma "brincadeira de crianças".
OVOODOCORVO
El Niño: food shortages, floods, disease and droughts set to put millions at risk
Agencies
warn of unchartered territory as strongest-ever El Niño threatens to
batter vulnerable countries with extreme weather for months
El
Niño could leave 4 million people in Pacific without food or
drinking water
John Vidal and
Damian Carrington
Monday 16 November
2015 13.04 GMT
The UN has warned of
months of extreme weather in many of the world’s most vulnerable
countries with intense storms, droughts and floods triggered by one
of the strongest El Niño weather events recorded in 50 years, which
is expected to continue until spring 2016.
El Niño is a
natural climatic phenomenon that sees equatorial waters in the
eastern Pacific ocean warm every few years. This disrupts regular
weather patterns such as monsoons and trade winds, and increases the
risk of food shortages, floods, disease and forest fires.
This year, a strong
El Niño has been building since March and its effects are already
being seen in Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Malawi, Indonesia and across
Central America, according to the World Meteorological Organisation.
The phenomenon is also being held responsible for uncontrolled fires
in forests in Indonesia and in the Amazon rainforest.
The UN’s World
Meteorological Organization warned in a report on Monday that the
current strong El Niño is expected to strengthen further and peak
around the end of the 2015. “Severe droughts and devastating
flooding being experienced throughout the tropics and sub-tropical
zones bear the hallmarks of this El Niño, which is the strongest in
more than 15 years,” said WMO secretary-general Michel Jarraud.
Jarraud said the
impact of the naturally occurring El Niño event was being
exacerbated by global warming, which had already led to record
temperatures this year. “This event is playing out in uncharted
territory. Our planet has altered dramatically because of climate
change,” he said. “So this El Niño event and human-induced
climate change may interact and modify each other in ways which we
have never before experienced. El Niño is turning up the heat even
further.”
In 1997, the
phenomenon led to severe droughts in the Sahel and the Indian
subcontinent, followed by devastating floods and storms, which killed
thousands of people and caused billions of dollars of damage across
Asia, Latin America and and Africa.
The WMO said
countries are expected to be much better prepared for a strong El
Niño now than they were in 1997, but governments and charities are
warning of serious food shortages and floods.
“While difficult
to predict, the El Niño this year looks set to be the strongest on
record. This is a real threat to people’s lives, health and
livelihoods across the world, which will see increased calls for
humanitarian assistance as people struggle to grow crops, face water
shortages and disease,” said a spokeswoman at Britain’s
Department for International Development (DfID) in London.
“Fragile states
like Yemen and South Sudan are already struggling with war and the
threat of famine. Without increased humanitarian support, El Niño
will make a difficult situation even worse,” she said.
“In Ethiopia and
the Sahel, the impact of changing weather patterns is already
visible. Outbreaks of diseases such as dengue fever, cholera and
malaria are possible, so it is essential that health systems are
shored up to respond.”
Rice and grain
harvests have already been hit hard by severe droughts, according to
the World Food Programme (WFP), which expects 2.3 million people in
Central America and many more in east and southern Africa to need
food aid. Rice shortages are expected in Indonesia, Vietnam, the
Philippines and south-east Asia.
“The weather
phenomenon, among the strongest on record, is likely to cause more
floods and droughts, fuel Pacific typhoons and cyclones and affect
more areas if it continues strengthening as forecast over the coming
months,” said the UN children’s agency, Unicef, in a statement
last week.
Unicef said it
expected 8.5 million people in Ethiopia to need food aid and several
million more in Somalia and Kenya. In Zimbabwe, the number of people
in need of food aid was expected to reach 1.5 million by the time of
the January to March “lean season”, according to the agency.
El Niño could leave
4 million people in Pacific without food or drinking water
One of the
worst-affected countries is likely to be Malawi, where the worst
drought in almost 10 years is expected to cause a further increase in
severe malnutrition next year.
In South Africa,
livestock has been dying as a result of drought, and water
restrictions have been imposed in Johannesburg, and other areas.
In Central America,
one of the most severe droughts on record has led to 3.5 million
people in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador needing food aid, said
the WFP. Peru and Ecuador expect more than 2 million people to be
affected.
“Another dry spell
in 2015, this time exacerbated by El Niño, has again caused
significant losses during the first crop cycle, the Primera season,”
the WFP’s regional director for Latin America and the
Caribbean,Miguel Barreto, said. “This has hit small producers and
their families who were struggling to recover from the previous
year’s drought, and the number of people in need may increase
soon.”
Last week, the
Indonesian government said that rice growing areas of Java had been
hit badly by drought.
“The world is much
better prepared for this year’s El Niño, but the socio-economic
shocks will still be profound,” said a spokesman for the World
Health Organisation.
Researchers expect
the risk of major fires in the Amazon basin to increase. More than
11,000 forest fires have been observed in the Amazonas province of
Brazil this year, a 47% increase over the same period last year,
according to the National Institute for Space Research (INPE). The
storms that usually keep the jungles of southern Mexico and Central
America wet shift northward to California and the southern US during
strong El Niño winters.
Britain has pledged
to provide £45m of emergency support for 2.6 million people and food
for up to 120,000 malnourished children in Ethiopia and elsewhere.
But it appealed on Monday to other countries to support humanitarian
efforts and disaster preparedness efforts.
“All DfID offices
are very much alive to the risks El Niño poses. Country teams from
Ethiopia to Kenya to Bangladesh are working hard to ensure help is
there for those suffering as a result of El Niño.
“In some places,
this might mean boosting resources for existing projects while in
others the effects may need to be monitored for longer to ensure the
best response,” DfID said.
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