With just 45 days to go before the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen, the negotiations still hang in the balance.  The UK has a strong interest in securing an ambitious global agreement. This is an issue that affects the future security and prosperity of our countries.

On 22 October, David Miliband, the UK Foreign Secretary, and Ed Miliband, the UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, publicly released a world map developed by the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, showing some of the impacts that may occur if the global average temperature rises by 4 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial climate average.   The map has involved senior scientists from the Met Office and builds on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Fourth Assessment Report.  But it also incorporates the most recent scientific findings to represent the latest information we have on climate impacts at four degrees.

The map shows significant temperature rises on land, with the hottest days of the year in many highly populated areas being between 6 and 12 degrees C, higher than they are now.  It examines the impacts on agricultural production, with potentially hundreds of millions more people at risk from hunger.  It tells us that climate change could lead to a situation later this century where more than a third of the global population is living in areas with limited availability of water.   

What are the implications for the UK and Bangladesh?  Agricultural yields are expected to decrease for all major cereal crops in all major regions of production.   In Europe, we will suffer the effects of increased water scarcity, more frequent and intense droughts and forest fires.  Bangladesh, and other countries in South Asia, will be vulnerable to sea level rises endangering over 100 million people as well as declining yields of staple crops such as maize, wheat and soya bean. Tropical storms like the recent one that devastated the Philippines will increase in both frequency and intensity.  More than half of all Himalayan glaciers will be significantly reduced by 2050.

Climate change is already affecting lives and livelihoods in Bangladesh, with devastating impact.  By 2050, 70 million people could be affected annually by floods and 8 million by drought, with increasingly intense cyclones hitting the coast.  The UK government, through the Department for International Development, is already investing approximately £200 million over the next five years to help six million extremely poor people improve their livelihoods and access to food.  These include some of the poorest and most vulnerable groups living on chars in the flood plains and coastal areas, as well as slum and street dwellers in towns and cities. 

In line with our White Paper commitments, we are also providing £75 million to support Bangladesh's national climate change strategy.  This will help to renovate embankments and shelters; enhance the early warning systems for flood and cyclone; promote climate resilient crops and livelihoods; build national as well as community-based preparedness for natural disasters; improve access to safe drinking water and sanitation in vulnerable communities; and conduct action research on adaptation to climate change.

But more global action is required now.  The map shows why this is a matter of immediate importance to all of us.  The geopolitical implications of the physical, economic and human impacts would be far-reaching and transformational.  Climate change will increasingly affect all of our policy decisions, changing not just the physical landscape but the political context and choices we have to work with.

This is why the UK Government is aiming for an agreement at Copenhagen that limits emissions to achieve a rise of no more than two degrees Celsius.  If we fail to deliver an ambitious agreement at Copenhagen then we are looking at the prospect of the world increasing by four degrees during the course of this century.  And that will have a potentially devastating impact, threatening our access to essential resources, our infrastructure, our social and economic stability and our very way of life.

Duncan Norman
Acting High Commissioner

23 October 2009