Advanced search

Global issues

• Afghanistan
• Arms control
• Climate change
• Priorities
• UN Climate Summit, Durban
• Low carbon economy
• Security
• Vulnerable countries
• Science
• The Commonwealth
• Conference on Somalia
• Conflict minerals
• Council of Europe
• Counter proliferation
• Counter terrorism
• Conference on Cyberspace
• European Union
• Growth and prosperity
• Human rights
• London 2012 Olympics
• Middle East and North Africa
• NATO
• Peacekeeping
• Piracy
• Polar Regions
• United Nations
• US - UK relations
• Women, peace & security

Vulnerable countries: effects of climate change

Poorer countries will be among the earliest victims of climate change and lack the resources to effectively adapt. People in developing countries have already suffered the effects of melting glaciers, flooding, rising sea levels, drought, crop failure, loss of farmland, increased disease, and the destruction caused by natural disasters.

It is vitally important that action is taken. Climate change has the potential to:

• roll back the lasting progress made on reducing poverty; for example it will hamper international efforts towards achieving the UN's Millennium Development Goals.
• impact developing countries' prosperity and peoples' livelihoods; a temperature rise of 2-3.5 degrees C would reduce the income of farmers in India by between 9% and 25%, according to the UK Department for International Development (DFID).
• Lead to a scarcity of resources for both personal use and for trading; for example, a temperature rise of 4 degrees C would make drought events occur twice as frequently across Southern Africa and South East Asia. Wide-spread food shortages would occur and the supply of raw materials to richer countries would be severely affected.
  

Having experienced first-hand the impacts of climate change, vulnerable countries are an important voice in the international debate on how to tackle the issue. They can press the moral imperative for richer countries to decarbonise their economies and encourage world leaders from major emitting countries to be ambitious in their action.

Berhanu Kebede, Ambassador for Ethiopia, explains how climate change is already affecting his country.

The Foreign Office, in collaboration with the Department for International Development and the Department of Energy and Climate Change, are working with vulnerable and developing countries to help them cope with the challenges of climate change, and to minimise the risks to their future development.