CHINA/FILE: The U.N. Executive Director of the Environment Programme warns about global warming impact on the world's environment.

The United Nation's environment chief, Achim Steiner said on Thursday (October 19) that the world is not doing enough to combat global warming which, left unchecked, could trigger a mass movement of people and have serious consequences on security. One area particularly threatened by climate change and rising temperatures is the world's coral reefs, an important fishing and tourism resource which the United Nations estimates has an annual economic value of 30 billion United States dollars. Since the late 1990s, when unusually high water temperatures killed off up to 90 percent of reefs in some parts of the world, there have been signs of recovery, according to a new U.N. report released on Thursday. "Well, if you ever wanted a sign that something that is happening up in the atmosphere can have a fundamental impact even on an ecosystem that we know relatively little about, you have it with coral reefs. The coral bleaching event of 1998 killed between 50 to 90 percent of the coral reefs, or bleached them at least in parts of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. So, we actually are faced with a major environmental calamity. And the report that we present today shows really how serious this destruction is, and how differential the recovery rates are in different parts of the world", Achim Steiner said on the sidelines of a marine forum meeting. Reef recovery depends on clean water, and in Asia and East Africa up to 90 percent of sewage is discharged directly into rivers and the sea, the report said. Experts have said that millions of people in densely populated, low-lying, developing countries like Bangladesh and parts of China, Indonesia and Vietnam may be forced to move by rising sea levels. "If the global warming trends continue at the moment - and the model suggests they are, and in fact may be doing so more rapidly - they have significant impacts on where people can live, and where people can grow food, and where people will have to leave because they can no longer live there - coastal areas. We will have disease spreading, we will have implications in terms of global trade, perhaps, nations that don't play their part in terms of climate regime, how do they work with nations that are investing in setting their CO2 emissions. So, the potential for conflict to arise from the consequences of global warming are major trends that we now see," Achim Steiner said. A summit of world environment ministers next month in the Kenyan capital Nairobi is expected to address climate change, and Steiner said he was confident of reaching a consensus.

ITN Source | October 19, 2006

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