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Global warming spells out water shortage
A third of the world's population lives in countries that find it difficult or impossible to meet water needs, a proportion that could double by 2025, said Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Wednesday. In developing countries, about 14,000 to 30,000 people die each day in developing countries from water-related diseases, Pachauri said at a conference of the IPCC Working Group I for the Fourth Assessment Report held in Beijing, which will end on Thursday. Climate changes, including rising temperatures and sea levels, precipitation change, droughts and floods may wield great power over human and natural systems, he said. Water shortage will be the most serious issue, affecting food production and bio-diversity as well as human water consumption, he said. The world has to rethink socio-economic development, including economic growth technology and population governance, to adapt to these changes, he said. Among the measures, 141 nations signed the UN Kyoto Protocol early this year, aiming to cut greenhouse gas emissions that fuel global warming. It imposes caps on carbon dioxide emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars, in 35 developed nations. China, as a developing country, will have to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to much lower levels in the later practice phase of the Protocol, but China will face great difficulties since the country relies largely on fossil fuel coal, said Qin Dahe, director of China Meteorological Administration and Co-chair of the IPCC Working Group I for the Fourth Assessment Report. With limited funds, China faces great challenges in developing technologies to adjust industrial structure and reduce carbon dioxide emission, without compromising the growth of the populous developing country, he said. The report under discussion will be issued in 2007 by the IPCC, the UN's top expert group, and the first comprehensive report on greenhouse gases was made in 2001, which calculated that, by 2100, temperatures would rise by 1.4 degrees Celsius (2.5 F) to 5.8 degrees Celsius (10.4 F) compared to 1990. The predicted consequences ranged from additional stress on water and food supplies in hot tropical countries to prolonged droughts and floods, violent storms, shrinkage of the polar ice caps and the meltdown of alpine glaciers. |
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