"The state has to invest much more money in regular maintenance of water management facilities and canals network and an adequate prevention could have lessened the consequences of the past two days" flooding by up to 70 percent, directors of water management enterprises and members of the PKS Water Management Association told Inserbia News.
A group of health experts from WHO, the Montenegrin Ministry of Health, Institute of Public Health and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) have agreed to work on a joint project to develop for the first time in Montenegro a strategy for adapting the national health system to climate change and its impact on Montenegrins’ health. At the national roundtable in Podgorica, held on 20 December 2013, public health experts discussed how to strengthen the capacity for understanding the health risks posed by climate change. Special emphasis was also given to responding to early warnings and having emergency plans in place. The Deputy Minister of Health, Dr Mira Dasic, spoke about how the effects of heat stress and extreme weather directly caused by hazardous weather conditions can result in increased morbidity or mortality. “Indirectly, we are also affected by diseases transmitted by water, food and allergens from the air," said Dr Dasic.
Climate change should be treated as an issue of national security, say military analysts familiar with links between environmental degradation and conflict. Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti, a former Royal Navy aircraft carrier commander and chief UK climate envoy in 2013, told RTCC no one country could afford to ignore the risks linked to rising temperatures. “We live in a globalised world where you can’t pull up the drawbridge in Dover, or in the Med. The reality is that what we’ve seen…the impacts of events being felt thousands of miles away,” he said. “I think we have become increasingly focused on Beachy Head rather than Ras Al-Hadd in the Middle East, in the Gulf, which is really our backyard.”
Sea–level rises, changes to the severity of monsoon seasons and rainfall, flooding, droughts and heatwaves are all predicted to have an increasing impact on our health.The World Health Organisation estimates that between 1970 and 2004, the environmental effects of climate change caused more than 140,000 deaths each year. And the direct financial cost of the damage it will have on our health is estimated to come in at around US$2-4 billion in just over 15 years time.
Extreme weather events
We tend to think of large-scale weather events as “natural” disasters, but the case is increasingly being made for a man-made cause and effect for some of these. While it is difficult to attribute single events such as Hurricane Katrina to climate change, climatologists have suggested a possible role in contributing to the intensity of these kinds of events. And flooding, droughts, heatwaves, and the spread of disease have all been linked to climate change.
A comprehensive study has outlined the path towards a standardized European approach to systematically record and manage disaster loss databases. The report, titled ‘Recording Disaster Losses: Recommendations for a European approach’, is in response to the European Union’s desire to find a mechanism to record systematically disaster losses and provide European loss data to international initiatives so that global trends can be charted. “Risk assessment requires accurate recording of previous disasters and in particular the associated losses in terms of human casualties, property and environment damage as well as economic loss,” the report says.
Impact Forecasting, the catastrophe model development center of excellence at Aon Benfield, today releases the latest edition of its monthly Global Catastrophe Recap report, which reviews the natural disaster perils that occurred worldwide during December 2013. Aon Benfield is the global reinsurance intermediary and capital advisor of Aon plc (NYSE: AON). The report reveals that Europe was impacted by a series of windstorms during the month, including Windstorm Xaver, which moved through the north of the continent killing at least 15 people and producing insured losses of around EUR800 million (USD1.1 billion), with Scotland, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavia, and Poland the most affected.
London is currently a city under siege from high tides and heavy rain, forcing authorities to raise the gates of the Thames Barrier for the 11th time in 11 days. Built in 1984, the barrier, which protects key historical and political landmarks in London from flooding, has only closed 138 times for flood defence purposes since it was completed in 1984. Over two thirds of these closures have taken place since 2000. The last 11 days have been one of its toughest tests yet. While the Thames Barrier will come under increasing strain as sea levels rise, the Environment Agency says that it will remain effective for another 50 years before serious changes are required – longer than was thought at the time it was built.
Scientists have made a big step in their efforts to find the causes for the eruptions of so-called supervolcanoes. Supervolcanoes are capable of eruptions thousands of times larger than normal outpourings. Super-eruptions do not happen often but when they do, they have a devastating impact on Earth's climate and ecology. What the scientists found is that a supervolcano can erupt due to its enormous size alone, reports BBC. "This is something that, as a species, we will eventually have to deal with. It will happen in future," said Dr Wim Malfait of European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. "You could compare it to an asteroid impact - the risk at any given time is small, but when it happens the consequences will be catastrophic."
This report addresses the need for a strong commitment to advancing resilience and disaster risk reduction (DRR) strategies. To advance the resilience approach significantly, the report calls for a strong integration of resilience measures into development and humanitarian programming. It also recognises the challenges posed by climate change and emphasises that climate change adaptation needs to be taken into account in resilience and DRR initiatives. The key focus of this report is on the most vulnerable, poorest and marginalised populations who have high exposure to risks, while on a broader scale targeting fragile and crisis-prone countries. It calls for a long-term resilience approach to target the root causes of risk and significantly reduce underlying risk factors. It also stresses: (i) the importance of all actors in building resilience, particularly local authorities who can play a central role in coordinating and sustaining a multi-level, multi-stakeholder platform to promote resilience and DRR in the region; (ii) that the resilience approach must focus on enhancing food security and nutrition must be systematically incorporated into programming decisions; and (iii) that there should be strong efforts made to tackle inefficient uses of funding for DRR and resilience activities and duplication of efforts in this regard.
A proposal for a revised legislation on the EU Civil Protection Mechanism designed to better protect and respond to natural and man-made disasters. It looks forward to increase the safety of EU citizens and disaster victims worldwide with provisions that ensure closer cooperation on disaster prevention, better preparedness and planning, and more coordinated and faster response actions. It proposes Member States to regularly share a summary of their risk assessments, share best practices, and help each other identify where additional efforts are needed to reduce the disaster risks in order to ensure better prevention. A better understanding of risks is also the departure point for planning an effective response to major disasters.