island nations

According to the new chief of the UN climate advisory, small islands are in severe danger of drowning as climate change raises sea levels. “Small island states will be really badly affected. A lot of them will be submerged – the Maldive islands, all those in the South Pacific and the Caribbean islands,” says Rajendra Pachauri, who was elected chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last week. “Japan could suffer difficulty although Japan is not quite as vulnerable as some of the small islands.

“In the next three, four, maybe five decades we will see the impact of climate change such as sea level rise, impact on agriculture, impact on water, impact on health because there are certain diseases and viruses which could increase,” Pachauri says. read more