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	The retreat of glaciers in the Andes region is a clear indicator of climate change by UN News & agencies   15 December 2009   Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said he backed the science of climate change. He said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change involved 2500 scientists examining and translating published science into a series of reports that were then publicly peer reviewed. The final report was endorsed by the panel, and a summary for policymakers backed by governments. "I do not believe that there is any process anywhere out there that is that systematic, that thorough and that transparent," he said.   UN agencies and their partner organizations took part in raising awareness of the humanitarian toll of climate change.   "Climate change is not some abstract problem for the future,” John Holmes, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, told reporters. “It’s a problem which is happening right here and now and happening to ordinary people, particularly the poorest and most vulnerable populations around the world.”   Mr. Holmes, who also serves as UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, pointed to the humanitarian impacts of climate change, including the increasing number and intensity of disasters, as well as migration triggered by factors such as a rise in sea levels.   “We can do something about this. We are not helpless in the face of this,” he stressed, underscoring the importance of disaster risk reduction and early warning systems.   The retreat of glaciers in the Andes region is a clear indicator of climate change. Vulnerable tropical glaciers now melt away at a much faster rate than anticipated by scientists a few years ago. Combined with changing precipitation patterns, this leaves millions of people exposed to an unstable and insufficient water supply for drinking water, irrigation and hydropower.   Dr. Edson Ramirez heads a team of scientists that has monitored several glaciers in the Andes since 1990-91, among them the famed Chacaltaya, close to Bolivia’s capital La Paz.   No need anymore. The 18,000 year-old glacier that delighted thousands of visitors has gone, leaving the ski hut and other remnants of what was once “the world’s highest ski resort” utterly misplaced on barren stones.   The melting of Andean glaciers has gone on for many decades, but the recent acceleration of the process has worried scientists. Ten years ago, Ramirez and his colleagues concluded that the glacier would survive until 2015. But in March this year he had to face the facts: “Chacaltaya has disappeared. It no longer exists”.   “The vulnerability is far greater than we expected”, he says. “The retreat of glaciers in the Andes has accelerated in recent years. It is now three times faster than it was before. We expect many other relatively small glaciers to disappear in the coming decade.”   “In our region the glaciers perhaps are the best indicators of climate change. However, the impacts of changing precipitation and the profound changes of many other ecosystems, like wetlands for example, may be even more severe.”   Ninety-nine percent of the world’s tropical glaciers are located in the Andes: Peru (71 percent), Bolivia (22 percent), Ecuador (4 percent) and Colombia (3 percent). Since many rivers originate from these glaciers, their melt waters contribute to the water supply of the capital cities La Paz, Quito and Lima and other large Andean cities.   The glaciers and their water basins provide a large part of the power used in the region, since 70 percent of the region’s power generation is hydroelectric. Irrigation water, essential for the particularly arid Pacific basin, is primarily of glacial origin.   Glaciers act as regulators of the hydrological system in almost all of the Andean areas. They play the role of gigantic reservoirs, capturing the precipitation in the wet season and releasing freshwater throughout the dry season.   Since the mid-1970s, surface temperatures in the region have increased by 0.34 degrees Celsius per decade. In the same period the shrinking of glaciers has accelerated. Many of them have lost more than half of their previous area and volume.   As the glaciers diminish and melt away, the volume of water resources is drastically reduced. According to a World Bank report earlier this year, Peruvian glaciers have lost more than a fifth of their mass in the past 35 years, reducing by 12 percent the water flow to the country’s costal region, where more than half the population lives.
	Majority of disaster deaths in 2009 climate-related, says UN by Margareta Wahlstrom UN Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction   Dec 2009   More than three quarters of those people who died in disasters this year lost their lives to extreme weather events, which caused $15 billion in damages worldwide, the top United Nations official on disaster risk reduction announced today.   Preliminary figures for the period from January to the end of November 2009 show that 224 of the 245 disasters were weather-related, and accounted for 55 million out of 58 million people affected.   Data shows that the number of people killed in disasters is falling because countries are better prepared and have better early warning systems, Margareta Wahlström, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction, told reporters in Copenhagen, Denmark, where the historic UN summit on climate change is under way.   “But the cost of disasters are equally, steadily going up very dramatically from the 1980s into this decade, and that increase is continuing year by year,” she stressed.   For poorer nations, they have seen costs jump from $10 billion to $15 billion annually, Ms. Wahlström pointed out, while wealthier countries have experienced a cost surge from $20 billion per year to well over $70 billion.   She noted that droughts – the most “complicated” of disasters to capture in statistics are not well-represented in the results announced today.   “It is a major hazard, and it’s a slow-moving one that kills people through bad health, malnutrition, disease and undermines livelihoods,” the official said. For example, in Africa, droughts accounts for les than 20 per cent of reported disasters, but represents 80 per cent of all people affected.   Addressing the same press conference, Michel Jarraud, Secretary-General of the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO), said that while natural hazards cannot be prevented, “we can provide the right information to prevent these extreme events from turning into disasters.”   With climate change being one of the complicating factors in hazards, “we know with great likelihood that a number of these disasters are likely or very likely to become more intense or more frequent,” he added.   He underscored that while climate information is crucial for analyzing hazard patterns, the past is no longer a good indicator to plan for the future given changing patterns, such as sea level rise, triggered by climate change.   For his part, Olav Kjorven, Assistant Administrator of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), stressed that climate-related natural disasters are not humanitarian catastrophes, but seriously jeopardize development gains.   “There is no doubt that they threaten the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals [MDGs], the time-bound targets that we have set for ourselves,” but they also could result in setbacks to affect generations to come, he said.   * Below is a link to Reuters Alertnet climate change feature. Visit the related web page
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