Global heating will push billions outside ‘human climate niche’ Guardian Damian Carrington Mon 22 May 2023 Global heating will drive billions of people out of the “climate niche” in which humanity has flourished for millennia, a study has estimated, exposing them to unprecedented temperatures and extreme weather. The world is on track for 2.7C of heating with current action plans and this would mean 2 billion people experiencing average annual temperatures above 29C by 2030, a level at which very few communities have lived in the past. Up to 1 billion people could choose to migrate to cooler places, the scientists said, although those areas remaining within the climate niche would still experience more frequent heatwaves and droughts. However, urgent action to lower carbon emissions and keep global temperature rise to 1.5C would cut the number of people pushed outside the climate niche by 80%, to 400 million. The analysis is the first of its kind and is able to treat every citizen equally, unlike previous economic assessments of the damage of the climate crisis, which have been skewed towards the rich. In countries with large populations and already warm climates most people will be pushed outside the human climate niche, with India and Nigeria facing the worst changes. India is already suffering from extreme heatwaves, and a recent study found that more than a third of heat-related deaths in summer from 1991-2018 occurred as a direct result of human-caused global heating. Prof Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter, UK, who led the new research, said: “The costs of global warming are often expressed in financial terms but our study highlights the phenomenal human cost of failing to tackle the climate emergency. “Economic estimates almost always value the rich more than the poor, because they have more assets to lose, and they tend to value those alive now over those living in the future. We’re considering all people as equal in this study.” Prof Chi Xu, at Nanjing University in China, and also part of the research team, said: “Such high temperatures [outside the niche] have been linked to issues including increased mortality, decreased labour productivity, decreased cognitive performance, impaired learning, adverse pregnancy outcomes, decreased crop yield, increased conflict and infectious disease spread.” Prof Marten Scheffer at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, and a senior author of the study, said those pushed outside the climate niche might consider migrating to cooler places: “Not just migration of tens of millions of people but it might be a billion or so.”

The idea of climate niches for wild animals and plants is well established but the new study, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, identified the climate conditions in which human societies have thrived. It found most people lived in places with mean annual temperatures spread around 13C or 25C. Conditions outside those are too hot, too cold or too dry and associated with higher death rates, lower food production and lower economic growth. “The climate niche describes where people flourish and have flourished for centuries, if not millennia in the past,” Lenton said. “When people are outside [the niche], they don’t flourish.” Scheffer said: “We were surprised how sharply limited humans have remained when it comes to their distribution relative to climate – this is a fundamental thing we’ve put our finger on.” The scientists then used climate and population models to examine likely future changes in the number of people outside the climate niche, which they defined as above an annual average temperature of 29C. There are 60 million people living outside the niche and exposed to dangerous heat, the researchers said. But with each rise of 0.1C in global temperature above the 1.2C of human-caused global heating already seen today, an extra 140 million people are driven outside the niche......read on     https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/22/global-heating-human-climate-niche

We’re in a new era of conflict and crisis. Can humanitarian aid keep up? “Utter neglect of displaced people has become the new normal.” Vox Jess Craig Jun 12, 2024,   In the past couple of years, a sharp uptick in conflicts and crises around the world has forced an unprecedented number of people to flee their homes, straining an already underfunded global aid system.  War has ravaged countries from Sudan to Ukraine. Climate change and extreme weather have forced millions to flee for protection. Gang violence has soared in Honduras and Haiti. Radical Islamic insurgencies and clashes between communities proliferated in Burkina Faso and the Sahel.  As a result of these coalescing crises, more than 114 million people were displaced from their homes in 2023, the highest number ever recorded by the United Nations refugee agency.  Last year, more than 360 million people worldwide needed humanitarian assistance. To cover the costs of aid, the United Nations appealed to global donors — primarily governments but also philanthropic individuals and institutes— for a record $56 billion.  But even as humanitarian needs peaked, funding for aid dwindled to its lowest levels since 2019. Less than half of that $56 billion was raised. As a result, the gap between global humanitarian funding needs and donor contributions reached its highest level in more than 20 years.And that’s not the worst part. What funding was available was not allocated equitably across the world’s crises. Conflicts in the Global South went vastly underfunded. Last week, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), a major humanitarian organization, published its annual ranking of the world’s most neglected displacement crises. Nine of 10 were in Africa. In those countries, the “utter neglect of displaced people has become the new normal,” said Jan Egeland, NRC’s secretary general. While there is no shortage of suffering around the globe, those living in long-ignored corners of violence-wracked regions face worse challenges without the help they need. Millions of people live in total aid blindspots. Funding gaps have forced aid groups to cut food rations or prioritize communities on the verge of famine. If major players continue to allow neglected crises to fester without sufficient funding for aid, they will continue to spiral out of control, overflowing to neighboring countries, and possibly destabilizing entire regions, causing untold human suffering. 

Extreme weather. A lack of lifesaving vaccines. Africa's cholera crisis is worse than ever. National Observer Sebabatso Mosamo, Farai Mutsaka & Gerald Imray | News | May 24th 2024 Extreme weather events have hit parts of Africa relentlessly in the last three years, with tropical storms, floods and drought causing crises of hunger and displacement. They leave another deadly threat behind them: some of the continent's worst outbreaks of cholera. In southern and East Africa, more than 6,000 people have died and nearly 350,000 cases have been reported since a series of cholera outbreaks began in late 2021. Malawi and Zambiahave had their worst outbreaks on record. Zimbabwe has had multiple waves. Mozambique, Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia also have been badly affected.All have experienced floods or drought — in some cases, both......                         

And health authorities, scientists and aid agencies say the unprecedented surge of the water-borne bacterial infection in Africa is the newest example of how extreme weather is playing a role in driving disease outbreaks.“The outbreaks are getting much larger because extremeclimate events are getting much more common," said Tulio de Oliveira, a South Africa-based scientist who studies diseases in the developing world. De Oliveira, who led a team that identified new coronavirus variants during the COVID-19 pandemic, said southern Africa's latest outbreaks can be traced to the cyclones and floods that hit Malawi in late 2021 and early 2022, carrying the cholera bacteria to areas it doesn't normally reach.  Zimbabwe and Zambia have seen cases rise as theywrestle with severe droughts and people rely on less safe sources of water in their desperation like boreholes, shallow wells and rivers, which can all be contaminated. Days after the deadly flooding in Kenya and other parts of East Africa this month, cholera cases appeared. The World Health Organization calls cholera a disease of poverty, as it thrives where there is poor sanitation and a lack of clean water. Africa has had eight times as many deaths this year as the Middle East, the second-most affected region.  Historically vulnerable, Africa is even more at risk as it faces the worst impacts of climate change as well as the effect of the El Niño weather phenomenon, health experts say......read on    https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/05/24/news/extreme-weather-vaccines-africa-cholera-crisis