Agence France-Presse: Low-lying and impoverished Asian coastal cities such as Dhaka, Manila and Jakarta are vulnerable to "brutal" damage from climate change without global action, environmental group WWF warned Thursday. Energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions must be curtailed in "mega-cities" where global warming will affect everything from national security to health and water availability, the influential campaign group said."Climate change is already shattering cities across developing Asia and will be even more brutal in the future," said Kim Carstensen, head of the WWF Global Climate Initiative. Including their suburbs, Dhaka, Manila and Jakarta now have a combined population of about 49 million, according to WWF.
It said better-off cities such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore also faced varying degrees of risk from climate change, such as rising sea levels, excessive rain, flooding and heatwaves. Hong Kong could see dramatically fewer cold days per year while dengue fever appears to be spreading to previously unaffected parts of Singapore, it noted.
"Asia is the most populous and arguably the most vulnerable continent in the world because of the high risk of climate impacts and relatively low adaptive capacity," the report said….
A drowned taxi in a 2007 flood in Jakarta. A great shot by gajah mada, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 License
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