Act now on floods, drought, says forum

Agence France-Presse: Nations should throw themselves into building defences against floods and drought, which may already be multiplying due to climate change, the World Water Forum here heard on Tuesday. The biggest-ever gathering on tackling the world's water crisis was warned that water-related catastrophes are more frequent and more brutal, inflicting a rising toll in lives and damage, and greenhouse gases are fingered as a cause.

"Global warming is intensifying these disasters," said Avinash Tyagi, director of the climate and water department at the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). Over the last century, temperatures had risen by 0.74 degrees Celsius (1.3 degrees Fahrenheit) but have accelerated sharply in the last 50 years, he said. This has coincided with changes in rainfall and snowfall, leading in turn to the now sadly familiar images of parched fields and flooded streets.

Tyagi said scientists were striving to fill gaps in their knowledge, but feared worse is to come when climate change shifts up a gear. "The projections point to the 21st century as the century of floods or the century of droughts," said Tyagi. "But it could be a century of floods and drought, a mixture of extremes."…