Climate change 'means more disasters' for Mozambique

Agence France-Presse: Floods, droughts, cyclones and epidemics will increasingly plague Mozambique in the coming years as climate change raises temperatures, the national disaster centre said in a study Monday. Mozambique is already disaster-prone, with long stretches of low-lying coast that make it one of Africa's most vulnerable countries to climate change.

As temperatures have risen over the past three decades, natural disasters and epidemic disease have increased -- a trend that is likely to worsen in the future, says the National Disaster Management Institute's new "Climate Change Report." "Mozambique's exposure to the risk of natural disaster will increase significantly over the next 20 years and beyond as a result of climate change," the study found.

The report, funded by the United Nations and Denmark, warns that Mozambique will suffer if the world does "too little, too late" to curb climate change. Mozambique's coast could shift 500 meters inland due to erosion, the study added -- a scenario the authors say "will probably be catastrophic" given that the country's population is concentrated along the coast…..

The Zambesi Delta, from the International Space Station, NASA