With diminished rice harvests, seawater seeping into aquifers and islands vanishing into rising oceans, Southeast Asia will be among the regions worst affected by global warming, said a report released yesterday by the Asian Development Bank.
The rise in sea levels may force the sprawling archipelago of Indonesia to redraw its sea boundaries, the report said.
All these changes would occur progressively over the next century, the bank estimated, giving countries time to improve their flood control systems, upgrade their irrigation networks and take measures to prevent forest fires, which the report predicts will become more common.
“Our modeling shows that sea levels will rise up to 70cm,” said Zhuang Juzhong (莊巨忠), an economist at the bank and one of the authors of the report. “That will force the relocation of many millions of people.”
Brackish water seeping into the water table in Jakarta, Indonesia, and the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam is already a growing problem, the report says.
Some of the 92 outermost small islands that serve as a baseline for the claims of coastal waters by Indonesia could disappear, the report said.
The margin of error of such complex projections so far into the future remains a nagging question, but the report’s conclusions are nonetheless sobering for Southeast Asian countries, which have a combined population of more than 563 million.
The report focuses on Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore and Vietnam.
A projected 30cm rise in sea levels in the Philippines by 2045 would flood about 2,000 hectares, affecting 500,000 people, the report says. Under another sequence of events, sea levels could rise 39 inches by 2080, affecting 2.5 million people in the Manila Bay area.
The authors of the report urged governments to build infrastructure adapted to climate change, arguing that the economic crisis was not incompatible with combating and adapting to global warming.
“The investment in climate change adaptation can serve as an effective fiscal stimulus,” said Tae Yong Jung, another author of the report.
Southeast Asia is particularly vulnerable to global warming because of the number of people who live near coastlines and the high rate of poverty. About 19 percent of Southeast Asians, some 93 million people, live on less than US$1.25 a day and are more vulnerable to the projected increase in typhoons, drought and floods.
The region also has a high percentage of agricultural workers, more than 40 percent of the population, who would face a decline in the production of rubber, rice, corn and other crops because of extreme weather, the report said.
The number of fish in the oceans is also likely to decline because of changes in currents caused by a warmer atmosphere.
In cities like Manila, Bangkok and Jakarta, which are already stiflingly hot for several months of the year, average temperatures in 2100 could be 5ºC hotter, the report says, using data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“If that’s the case, the cities will be like an oven,” Zhuang said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver