UN report sees global warming cost at $1.45 trillion

DNA (India): Global warming will reduce the world's crop production by up to 2% every decade and wreak $1.45 trillion of economic damage by the end of this century, according to a draft UN report, Japanese media said on Friday.

The document is the second volume in a long-awaited trilogy by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a Nobel-winning group of scientists, which is set to be issued next month after a five-day meeting in Japan, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported. The trilogy is the IPCC's first great overview of the causes and effects of global warming, and options for dealing with it, since 2007.

According to the draft, if global temperatures rise by 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 Fahrenheit), the world's aggregated gross domestic production will fall by 0.2 to 2%, the mass circulation said. That would translate into $147 billion to $1.45 trillion in economic losses, calculated against the world's total GDP in 2012, it said.

The planet's crop production will decline by up to 2% every decade as rainfall patterns shift and droughts batter farmland, even as demand for food rises a projected 14%, it said.

Other effects from global warming include the loss of land to rising sea levels, forcing hundreds of millions of people to migrate from coastal areas, with the most vulnerable regions including East, South and Southeast Asia, it said.

The draft report, which will be reviewed in the March 25-29 meeting in Yokohama, calls for mitigation measures to reduce the vulnerability of environments to climate change such as flood protection projects and research on the prevention of infectious diseases, it said....