Residents of Mexico City take shelter from the heat in a covered area, on a central street in the capital, in the month of March, when spring has not even arrived yet in the country. Heat waves will become more frequent and will last longer, due to the climate emergency. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Mar 14 2023 (IPS)

On Mar. 9, more than half of Mexico reported maximum temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius, although spring has not even arrived yet in this Latin American country located in the northern hemisphere.

In fact, the Megalopolis Environmental Commission, which brings together the federal government, the Mexican capital city government and those of five states in the center of the country, forecasts four heat waves, a level similar to that of 2022 – one in March, one in April and two in May – before summer.

Despite constituting a public health problem, Mexico lacks a national heat warning system, like the ones that other Latin American nations, such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia, have in place.“The authorities must keep the public informed and get them to take the necessary measures. It is very important for the entire population to know what kind of weather lies ahead and to act appropriately. Unfortunately, misinformation is a social problem that we must eradicate all together, but it cannot be a pretext to say that we did not know what could happen." -- Ismael Marcelo

Ismael Marcelo of the National Meteorological Service recommended the creation of a warning system with a regional scope, based on temperature levels.

“Most of the population has a cell phone,” the meteorologist told IPS. “It’s important for the authorities to inform the public about meteorological events that affect us. In a culture of prevention, we have to adapt. At the National Meteorological Service we have all the tools to inform people, a website and through the social networks.”

A heat wave is an unusually hot, dry or humid period that begins and ends abruptly, lasting at least two to three days, with a discernible impact on humans and ecosystems, as defined by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), based in Washington DC.

These phenomena cause public health problems, especially for vulnerable groups – such as children and the elderly – food spoilage, increased air pollution, atmospheric environmental emergencies and forest fires.

The Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization warns that heat waves and other negative trends in the climate will become more frequent and will continue until at least 2060, due to the climate crisis.

In Mexico, a federal country, there are two governments that do have their own heat warning systems: Mexico City, which has a Meteorological Early Warning Network, and the southeastern state of Veracruz, which has a Grey Alert.

The scorching sun

Meanwhile, several Latin American countries do have heat warning systems.

In Colombia, a country of 52 million people, the government Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies monitors hot spots.

Lídice Álvarez, an academic in the nursing program at the Colombian University of Magdalena, told IPS about the relative usefulness of early warnings.

“In assessing how to prevent mortality from climatic events, we found that early warnings help, but it is difficult to predict certain events, because climatic variability further complicates things,” she told IPS from the city of Santa Marta, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast.

“What they do is to say that we are in a heat wave. But the public do not pay attention to the warnings. There is no discipline when it comes to checking climatological variables.”

In Colombia, heat waves have not yet occurred this quarter, but when the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon hits in July, a period of drought and lack of rain is expected, which will bring heat waves in the Caribbean zone in the second half of the year. ENSO cools the surface of the ocean and unleashes droughts in some parts of the planet and storms in others.

In Chile, a country of 19.2 million inhabitants, the government of Santiago introduced an “Extreme Heat and High Temperatures” system in December, which seeks to prevent deaths and protect people’s health during the southern hemisphere summer, through preventive alerts.

The number of heat waves in the Andean country increased from nine to 62 in the last 10 summers, according to figures from the Annual Environment Report from the government’s National Institute of Statistics.

In the metropolitan region there were 81 heat waves between 2011 and 2020 and forecasts point to a doubling of the percentage of days of extreme temperatures in the next 30 years. During a summer day in Chile, 100 people die from different causes, but when the temperature exceeds 34 degrees Celsius, the number goes up by 10 additional deaths, related to heat waves in Santiago.

Since 2018, Argentina’s National Meteorological Service (SMN) has operated a national warning system, which ranges from white to red according to the impact on human health, in the country of 46 million people.

Since 2009, the SMN has used a heat wave alert mechanism in the capital, Buenos Aires, which was later replicated in several other cities. In the current southern hemisphere summer that officially ends on Mar. 20, there have been nine heat waves so far, and in the metropolitan area of ​​Buenos Aires a red alert has been issued due to the high temperatures.

The places marked in red show spots where temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius were recorded in Mexico on Mar. 9, according to a map of the National Water Commission. In Latin America, extreme heat warnings can save lives. CREDIT: Conagua

A worsening problem

In Mexico, population 129 million, events due to high temperatures and victims of heat stroke are on the rise, with the exception of 2020, due to the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic led millions of people to stay at home.

In 2018, 631 health incidents linked to extreme temperatures and 30 deaths were documented, with the numbers growing to 838 and 44 the following year, according to figures from the General Directorate of Epidemiology, under the Ministry of Health.

Due to the pandemic, the numbers fell to 193 health events and 37 deaths in 2020, but the first figure jumped to 870 in 2021, although the latter dropped to 33. However, in 2022 both statistics climbed, to 1,100 and 42, respectively.

PAHO recommends strengthening the ability of the health sector, through the design of action plans against heat waves that include improvements in preparedness and response to this threat, to reduce the excess of diseases, deaths and social disruptions.

It also recommends improving the capacities of the meteorological services to generate accurate projections and forecasts, so that meteorological information can be used for decision-making before, during and after a heat wave.

Marcelo, the Mexican meteorologist, emphasized the importance of disseminating information.

“The authorities must keep the public informed and get them to take the necessary measures. It is very important for the entire population to know what kind of weather lies ahead and to act appropriately. Unfortunately, misinformation is a social problem that we must eradicate all together, but it cannot be a pretext to say that we did not know what could happen,” he said.

Álvarez from Colombia said mortality is preventable. “We have focused on how people are part of the problem and can take measures. They believe that they cannot make any changes, but they are realizing that simple steps taken at home can generate changes,” she said.

The UN’s heavily-hyped Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which were approved by more than 160 world leaders at a summit meeting in September, are an integral part of the world body’s post-2015 development agenda, including the eradication of hunger and poverty by 2030.

But that ambitious goal, warns the UN’s sister institution, the World Bank, can be thwarted by the devastating impact of climate change on the world’s poorest people.

In a new study released Monday, the World Bank says climate change is already preventing people from escaping poverty.

“And without rapid, inclusive and climate-smart development, together with emissions-reductions efforts that protect the poor, there could be more than 100 million additional people in poverty by 2030.”

The report, released ahead of the international climate conference in Paris November 30-December 11, finds that poor people are already at high risk from climate-related shocks, including crop failures from reduced rainfall, spikes in food prices after extreme weather events, and increased incidence of diseases after heat waves and floods.

Titled ‘Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty’, the study says such shocks could wipe out hard-won gains, leading to irreversible losses and, driving people back into poverty, particularly in Africa and South Asia.

According to the report, the poorest people are more exposed than the average population to climate-related shocks such as floods, droughts, and heat waves, and they lose much more of their wealth when they are hit.

In the 52 countries where data was available, 85 per cent of the population live in countries where poor people are more exposed to drought than the average.

Poor people are also more exposed to higher temperatures and live in countries where food production is expected to decrease because of climate change, the report notes.

“This report sends a clear message that ending poverty will not be possible unless we take strong action to reduce the threat of climate change on poor people and dramatically reduce harmful emissions,” said World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim.

“Climate change hits the poorest the hardest, and our challenge now is to protect tens of millions of people from falling into extreme poverty because of a changing climate,” he added.

Asked for a response, Harjeet Singh, Climate Policy Manager at ActionAid, told IPS the World Bank’s analysis of poor people’s vulnerability to climate impacts is not new, but it rightly highlights that poverty cannot be addressed without tackling climate change.

He said poor people and poor countries are most vulnerable to climate change as they have limited assets, skills and knowledge to overcome the effects.

“However, the World Bank is coming late to the game with its talk of improving social protection to fight the effects of climate change”, Singh said.

In reality, he pointed out, the World Bank has had a long and dubious record of forcing developing countries to reduce their public expenditure to provide basic services, and protecting socially and economically weaker populations.

“It will need to address this before it can reliably practise what the report preaches,” he declared.

Louise Whiting, senior policy analyst, water security and climate change at the UK-based WaterAid, told IPS the world’s poorest are most at risk from climate change and are receiving the least amount of climate-change financing to help them adapt to climate-related weather shocks including flood, drought and heat waves.

“Our research tells us that in Bangladesh alone, an estimated 38 million lives are at risk between now and 2050 because of climate-change related disasters,” she pointed out.

“The climate path we are on now means an end to development – an end to all progress on extreme poverty.”

She said for families living in extreme poverty, with fragile access to safe water, good sanitation and hygiene, these lengthening dry seasons and intensifying monsoons wipe out years of work and further entrench the cycle of poverty.

“Safeguarding basic services including clean water, sanitation and hygiene helps communities recover faster and become more resilient to climactic extremes.”

Whiting said national governments in developing countries need more support in designing and implementing projects to help eradicate poverty while building communities’ resilience to climate change, as well as financing.

Leaders at this month’s crucial talks in Paris must not forget the world’s poorest, and include a strong focus on helping them to adapt to this challenging new reality, she added.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Children from informal settlements in Pakistan’s most populous city, Karachi, are often sent out with large containers to fetch water from taps outside private homes, set up by wealthier residents as an act of charity. Credit: Zofeen T. Ebrahim/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Jun 25 2015 (IPS)

Over 950 people have perished in just five days. The morgues, already filled to capacity, are piling up with bodies, and in over-crowded hospitals the threat of further deaths hangs in the air.

Pakistan’s port city of Karachi, home to over 23 million people, is gasping in the grip of a dreadful heat wave, the worst the country has experienced since the 1950s, according to the Meteorology Department.

“In all my 25 years of service, I’ve never seen so many dead bodies arriving in such a short time." -- Mohammad Bilal, head of the Edhi Foundation’s morgue
Temperatures rose to 44.8 degrees Celsius on Saturday, Jun. 20, dropped slightly the following day and then shot back up to 45 degrees on Tuesday, Jun. 23 putting millions in this mega-city at risk of heat stroke.

Though the entire southern Sindh Province is affected – recording 1,100 deaths in total – its capital city, Karachi, has been worst hit – particularly due to the ‘urban heat island’ phenomenon, which climatologists say make 45-degree temperatures feel like 50-degree heat.

In this scenario, heat becomes trapped, turning the city into a kind of slow-cooking oven.

Every single resident is feeling the heat, but the majority of those who have succumbed to it come from Karachi’s army of poor, twice cursed by a lack of access to electricity and condemned to live in crowded, informal settlements that offer little respite from the scorching sun.

Already crushed by dismal health indicators, the poor have scant means of avoiding sun exposure, which intensifies their vulnerability.

Anwar Kazmi, spokesperson for the Edhi Foundation, Pakistan’s biggest charity, tells IPS that 50 percent of the dead were picked up from the streets, and likely included beggars, drug users and daily wage labourers with no choice but to defy government advisories to stay indoors until the blaze has passed.

Two days into the crisis, with every free space occupied and corpses arriving by the hundreds, the city’s largest morgue, run by the same charity, began burying bodies that had not been claimed.

“In all my 25 years of service, I’ve never seen so many dead bodies arriving in such a short time,” Mohammad Bilal, who heads the Edhi Foundation’s mortuary, tells IPS.

The government has come under fire for neglecting to sound the alarm in advance. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Sindh Chief Minister Syed Qaim Ali Shah issued belated warnings by ordering the closure of schools and government offices.

Hospitals, meanwhile, are groaning under the strain of attempting to treat some 40,000 people across the province suffering from heat exhaustion and dehydration.

Saeed Quraishy, medical superintendent at Karachi’s largest government-run Civil Hospital, says they have stopped all elective admissions in order to focus solely on emergencies cases.

Experts say this highlights, yet again, the country’s utter lack of preparedness for climate-related tragedies.

And as always – as with droughts, floods or any other extreme weather events – the poor are the first to die off in droves.

Energy and poverty

The crisis is shedding light on several converging issues with which Pakistan has been grappling: energy shortages, the disproportionate impact of climate change on the poor and the fallout from rapid urbanisation. In Karachi, the country’s most populous metropolis, these problems are magnified manifold.

Though a census has not been carried out since 1998, NGOs say there are hundreds of millions who live and work on the streets, including beggars, hawkers and manual labourers.

More than 62 percent of the population here lives in informal settlements, with a density of nearly 6,000 people per square kilometre.

Many of them have no access to basic services like water and electricity, both crucial during times of extreme weather. The ‘kunda’ system, in which power is illegally tapped from the electrical mains, is a popular way around the ‘energy apartheid’.

Just this month, the city’s power utility company pulled down 1,500 such illicit ‘connections’.

But even the 46 percent of households across the country that are connected to the national electric grid are not guaranteed an uninterrupted supply. With Pakistan facing a daily energy shortage of close to 4,000 mega watts, power outages of up to 20 hours a day are not unusual.

At such moments, wealthier families can fall back on generators. But for the estimated 91 million people in the country who live on less than two dollars a day, there is no ‘Plan B’ – there is only a battle for survival, which too many in the last week have fought and lost.

For the bottom half of Pakistani society, official notifications on how to beat the heat are simply in one ear and out the other.

Taking lukewarm showers, using rehydration salts or staying indoors are not options for families eking out a living on 1.25 dollars or those who live in informal settlements where hundreds of households must share a single tap.

The government has advised residents of Pakistan’s port city of Karachi to stay indoors until a deadly heat wave passes, but for daily wage labourers this is not an option: no money means no food. Credit: Zofeen T. Ebrahim/IPS

Lashing out at the government’s indifference and belated response to the crisis, Dr. Tasneem Ahsan, former executive director of the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC), tells IPS that preventive action could have saved countless lives.

“The government should have taken up large spaces like marriage halls and schools and turned them into shelters, supplying electricity and water for people to come and cool down there.”

She also says officials could have parked water bowsers in poorer localities for people to douse themselves, advised the population on appropriate clothing and distributed leaflets on simple ways to keep cool.

The media, too, are at fault, she contends, for reporting the death count like sports scores instead of spreading the word on cost-effective, life-saving tips “like putting a wet towel on the head”.

Government inaction

Intermittent protests against power outages, aimed largely at the city’s main power company, K-Electric, served as a prelude to the present tragedy.

Though the country has an installed electricity capacity of 22,797 MW, production stands at a dismal 16,000 MW. In recent years, electricity demand has risen to 19,000 MW, meaning scores of people are either sharing a single power line or going without energy.

Meanwhile, civil society has been stepping in to fill the void left by the government, with far better results than some official attempts to provide emergency relief.

With most hospitals paralyzed by the number of patients, volunteers like Dr. Tasneem Butt, working the JPMC, have taken matters into their own hands. Using social media as a platform, she has circulated a list of necessary items including 100-200 bed sheets, 500 towels, bottled water, 15-20 slabs of ice and – perhaps most importantly – more volunteers.

“I got them immediately,” she tells IPS. “Now I’ve asked people to hold on to their pledges while I arrange for chillers and air-conditioners.

“The emergency ward is suffocating,” she adds. “It’s not just the patients who need to be kept cool, even the overworked doctors need this basic environment to be able to work optimally.”

Last week, the government of the Sindh Province cancelled leave for medical personnel and brought in additional staff to cope with the deluge of patients, which is expected to increase as devout observers of the Holy Ramadan fast succumb to fatigue and hunger.

The monsoon rains are still some days away, and until they arrive there is no telling how many more people will be moved from the streets into graves.

Interestingly, while other parts of the province have recorded higher temperatures, the deaths have occurred largely in Karachi due to urban congestion and overcrowding, experts say, with the majority of deaths reported in poor localities like Lyari, Malir and Korangi.

The end may be in sight for now, but as climate change becomes more extreme, incidents like these are only going to increase in magnitude and frequency, according to climatologists like Dr. Qamar-Uz-Zaman Chaudhry

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

These goats in the Caribbean seek out shade in a bid to ward off heat stress that is driving up livestock mortality rates in the region. Credit: Cedric Lazarus/FAO

By Jewel Fraser
PARAMARIBO, Suriname, Oct 8 2014 (IPS)

Livestock farmers in the Caribbean are finding it increasingly difficult and expensive to rear healthy animals because of climate change, a situation that poses a significant threat to a region that is already too dependent on imports to feed its population.

Norman Gibson, a livestock scientist with the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI), says the effects of climate change mean that farmers must spend more money on feedstock to produce healthy animals, as well as coping with higher mortality rates among their flocks due to heat stress.Once an animal’s core body temperature goes above 45 degrees Celsius, its homeostasis is disrupted, eventually leading to death. So Caribbean farmers are now investing in ventilation systems to keep their livestock cooler.

Gibson was part of a panel discussion at the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA)’s Caribbean Week of Agriculture (CWA), being held in Paramaribo, Suriname, Oct. 6–12. The annual event hosted by the CTA focused on promoting policies and practices that will help farmers to adapt to climate change.

Gibson pointed out that decreases in livestock production would have a significant impact on the Caribbean region, where meat forms a major part of the diet. The region imports 40 million dollars worth of meat annually from New Zealand and Australia, he told the audience, and “imports are growing faster than [local] production.”

At the same time, research has shown that climate change is resulting in higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere which “leads to changes in the nutritional status of plants”, he told IPS. He said that tropical grasses are not the most nutritious, and with increases in CO2 they become even less so.

“So animals would have to eat even more to get an acceptable level of nutrition. Because that is often impossible, if you want your animals to produce at a certain level you have to supplement with concentrated feed, which in the Caribbean is imported,” he told IPS, and expensive.

He added that in places like Guyana, that are below sea level and sinking further, salt water intrusion is further compromising the feedstock available for ruminants.

“Once salt water gets into pastures, most of the grass that we currently grow is not adapted to high levels of salts. Most of these grasses have low salt tolerance and therefore will not thrive or grow under those conditions. So scientists will now have to find new breeds of grass that are more tolerant,” he said.

He said a breed of grass from International Centre for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia was showing promise in Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Barbados and St. Kitts.

“A lot of the dairy production in Trinidad and Tobago is based on that particular grass…In St. Kitts, it is now the major grass of choice for small ruminant farmers.”

He also pointed out that temperatures were for a certainty increasing, though there was less certainty about increased precipitation. These higher temperatures lead to heat stress in animals that reduces their ability to reproduce.

Heat stress is leading to levels of mortality of up to 15 per cent among ruminants, the FAO’s Cedric Lazarus told IPS. Lazarus was also at the CWA and spoke of efforts being made around the region to reduce the heat stress being suffered by animals.

He explained that once an animal’s core body temperature goes above 45 degrees Celsius, its homeostasis is disrupted, eventually leading to death. So Caribbean farmers are now investing in ventilation systems to keep their livestock cooler, he said.

“It’s the only way you can keep those high-producing breeds of cattle and ensure they survive.” He said the use of ventilation systems was seen particularly in Barbados.

Planting more trees was also a viable—and simple—way of providing more shade for animals, he added.

He said studies showed heat stress also led to a precipitous decrease in milk yields, sometimes by as much as 33 percent, thus reducing the animal’s profitability.

Gibson added that because of the extreme heat the region has been experiencing and the resulting discomfort felt by animals, there were abnormalities in their sperm and a fall-off in vigour resulting in reduced conception rates.

“A livestock farmer’s success depends on how many animals he can get to the market each year, which is a function of how well his animals reproduce,” he told IPS.

Both Gibson and Lazarus said the impact of climate change meant that farmers would have to rely more on local breeds of ruminants to ensure they have hardy stock that can cope with the region’s increasingly intense heat, though there has been a tendency over the past 15 to 20 years to bring in foreign breeds to “improve” local livestock.

Farmers often see foreign livestock as a chance to improve their herd because it means introducing fresh blood without the problems that traditionally come with inbreeding, said Rommel Parris, a black belly sheep farmer and president of the Barbados Sheep and Goat Farmers Association.

However, Parris said, the benefits of a new genetic pool do not outweigh the disadvantages of the foreign stock in the hot Caribbean climate.

“Your cost goes up because you have to keep them in air-conditioned rooms or use fans to cool them down. You have to feed them with special feeds. You have to adjust to the diet they were receiving before. Caring for these animals is tougher than caring for those animals that are adapted to this region for years,” he told IPS.

He added that foreign stock tend to produce fewer offspring, as well, than the local breeds, and are more susceptible to the parasites in the region.

Though inbreeding of local stocks does bring a somewhat weaker herd, “farmers know how to treat their own animals. A lot of them are proactive and know what the signs are and how to prevent sickness in advance…They can pick up on them fairly quickly,” he said, thus reducing mortality rates and losses.

The majority of ruminants in the region are still the local, creole animals, Lazarus said, but the Caribbean needs to guard against the mistake made in other parts of the world, where the introduction of foreign breeds led to the extinction of local, more sustainable animals.

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at jwl_42@yahoo.com

Rich benthic fauna and associated reef fish, Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia, which is expected to be one of the first places in the world to see prolonged, record-breaking heatwaves. Credit: Courtesy of Keoki Stender, Marinelifephotography.com

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Oct 10 2013 (IPS)

A climate plague affecting every living thing will likely start in 2020 in southern Indonesia, scientists warned Wednesday in the journal Nature. A few years later the plague will have spread throughout the world’s tropical regions.

By mid-century no place on the planet will be unaffected, said the authors of the landmark study."Within my generation, whatever climate we were used to will be a thing of the past." -- Nature study lead author Camilo Mora

“We don’t know what the impacts will be. If someone is about to fall off a three-storey building you can’t predict their exact injuries but you know there will be injuries,” said Camilo Mora, an ecologist at University of Hawai‘i in Honolulu and lead author.

“The results shocked us. Regardless of the scenario, changes will be coming soon,” said Mora.

The “climate plague” is a shift to an entirely new climate where the lowest monthly temperatures will be hotter than those in the past 150 years. The shift is already underway due to massive emissions of heat-trapping carbon from burning oil, gas and coal.

Extreme weather will soon be beyond anything ever experienced, and old record high temperatures will be the new low temperatures, Mora told IPS. This will affect billions of people and there is no going back to way things were.

“Within my generation, whatever climate we were used to will be a thing of the past,” he said.

In less than 10 years, a country like Jamaica will look much like it always has but it will not be the same country. Jamaicans and every living thing on the island and in its coastal waters will be experiencing a new, hotter climate – hotter on average than the previous 150 years.

The story will be same around 2030 in southern Nigeria, much of West Africa, Mexico and Central America without major reductions in the use of fossil fuels, the study reports.

“Some species will adapt, some will move, some will die,” said co-author Ryan Longman also at the University of Hawai‘i.

Tropical regions will shift first because their historical temperature ranges are narrow. Climate change may only shift temperatures by 1.0 degree C but that will be too much for some plants, amphibians, animals and birds that have evolved in a very stable climate, Longman said.

Tropical corals are already in sharp decline due to a combination of warmer ocean temperatures and  higher levels of ocean acidity as oceans absorb most the carbon from burning oil, gas and coal.

The Nature study examined 150 years of historical temperature data, more than a million maps, and the combined projections of 39 climate models to create a global index of when and where a region shifts into novel climate. That is to say a local climate that is continuously outside the most extreme records the region has experienced in the past 150 years.

Canada’s climate won’t shift until 2050 under the business as usual emissions scenario the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calls RCP8.5. The further a region is from the equator, the later the shift occurs. If the world sharply reduces its use of fossil fuels (RCP4.5), then these climate shifts are delayed 10 to 30 years depending on the location, the study shows. (City by city projection here)

Tropical regions are also those with greatest numbers of unique species. Costa Rica is home to nearly 800 species, while Canada, which is nearly 200 times larger in area, has only about 70 unique or endemic species.

Species matter because the abundance and variety of plants, animals, fish, insects and other living things are humanity’s life support system, providing our air, water, food and more.

“It’s an elegant study that shows timing of when climate shifts beyond anything in the recent past,” said Simon Donner, a climate scientist at Canada’s University of British Columbia.

Donner, who wasn’t involved in the study, agrees that the new regional climates in the tropics will have big impacts on many species.

“A number of other studies show corals, birds, and amphibians in the tropics are very sensitive to temperature changes,” Donner told IPS.

The impacts on ecosystems, food production, water availability or cites and towns are not known. However, the results of the study confirm the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions to reduce those future impacts, he said.

Developed countries not only need to make larger reductions in their emissions, they need to increase their “funding of social and conservation programmes in developing countries to minimize the impacts of climate change”, the study concludes.

Amongst the biggest impacts the coming ‘climate plague’ will have is on food production, said Mora.

“In a globalised world, what happens in tropics won’t stay in the tropics,” he said.