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Haiti most negatively impacted by climate change – report
The Caribbean nation of Haiti, is the country most affected by climate-related catastrophes in the decade ending 2012, according to a report released late last week.
The report, titled “The 9th annual Global Climate Risk Index” states that the major share of economic and human burden of weather catastrophes were on developing countries.
The release of the report, which was prepared by Germanwatch, was overshadowed by the ongoing human catastrophe in the Philippines, where 10,000 persons are feared dead as a result of Typhoon Hiayan last weekend.
Germanwatch advocates for “a political, economic and social framework which can ensure a future for the people of the South, who are being pushed to the margins of society through unbridled globalization and whose very existence is threatened by the loss of their ecological and economic foundations of their livelihoods”.
“The index shows that the most severe weather related catastrophes in 2012 occurred in Haiti, Philippines and Pakistan”, Sönke Kreft, team leader International Climate Policy at Germanwatch and co-author of the index said.
“The landfall of Hurricane Sandy in the American dominated international news in October 2012. Yet, it was Haiti – that suffered the greatest losses from the same event,” Kreft noted.
Sandy struck Haiti at a time when 350,000 people in the capital, Port-au-Prince, were still living in camps for displaced refugees, three years after a devastating earthquake.
The storm unleashed (508 mm) 20 inches of rain on the country, killed 52 people, flooded much of the country’s south, and displaced over 18,000 families. -(CMC)