Map-making highlights impact of climate change

ABC News (Australia): It has been four years since the last edition of The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, and cartographers say they have had to redraw coastlines and reclassify land to reflect significant geographical changes since then. The atlas's editor-in-chief says the new maps will let us see environmental disasters unfolding before our eyes.

Some of the most marked changes highlighted in the new atlas include the Aral Sea in central Asia, which has shrunk by 74 per cent since 1967, Lake Chad in Africa, which has shrunk by 95 per cent since 1963, and the Dead Sea in the Middle East, which is 25 metres lower than it was 50 years ago. As well, sections of the Rio Grande, Yellow, Tigris, and Colorado rivers dry out each summer, and sometimes they fail to reach the sea…

Dr Peter Cowell, from the School of Geosciences at Sydney University, has looked closely at the impact of climate change on coastlines…"So increasingly, as sea levels rise and [we see] changes in the hydrograph, that is, the way the rivers flood, the nuisance value of such flooding is just going to get gradually and imperceptibly worse, and will require expense to solve through engineering works or relocation."

…In fact, Dr Cowell says environmental mismanagement currently plays a greater role in land degradation than climate change…"The climate change impacts in most cases will be relatively small. "None of this means that climate change is not happening. It just means that it's complicated trying to unravel which are the actual causes and the contributions from each source to these changes."

Climate change is high on the agenda of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders meeting agenda this week and Dr Cowell says the question of what needs to be done is difficult…."The reality of it is that climate is going to change and is changing, and environmental change is occurring as well.

…"Overall, at this stage, it looks like the best bet is to learn how to adapt to the environmental changes that are occurring because they are going to occur anyway - that's in the immediate term.

"Over the long-term, one hopes that we learn somehow to collaborate internationally to curtail the effects on the atmosphere that we think are going to precipitate much larger changes into the future."