With the climate change fueling dangerous weather globally and with the increasing threat of the climate crisis, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) announced a new United Nations objective, an early warning system that will cover everyone in the next five years.
The agency has estimated that around 1.5 billion dollars will be the cost of covering everyone across the globe under the early warning system.
Earlier this week, António Guterres, the Secretary-General of United nations said that half of the humanity already is in the danger zone. And yet, almost one-third of the world’s population, mainly in the least developed countries and Small Island developing states, are still far from being covered by the early warning systems.
The 2019 Global Commission on Adaptation flagship report “Adapt Now” observed that the Early Warning Systems deliver over ten times the return on investment, which is the greatest of any adaptation measures included in the report.
World Meteorological Organization data says that since 1970, the droughts, floods, heat waves and storms have killed over 2 million people globally and have withered almost 3.64 trillion dollars in losses.
With the rising global temperatures, the trend is expected to worsen and there is an immediate need to invest 1.5 billion dollars over the next five years to help in predicting when extreme events might occur, said Petteri Taalas, the Secretary-General of World Meteorological Organization.
Africa is particularly vulnerable to natural disasters, which in turn can have severe impacts on food security. Parts of the African continent are frequently devastated by drought, cyclones or intense rainfall, other than that, around 60 percent of the population lives in areas that are not covered by early-warning weather systems.
While natural disasters have become more frequent in the past few decades, the early warning systems have helped hugely in cutting down the death tolls by around 76 percent since the 1970s by allowing people time to prepare for the incoming danger.
Early warning systems can also help protect economies. According to a 2019 report by the Global Commission on Adaptation, a 24-hour prior warning of a storm, for example, can help people bring down the damage by approximately 30 percent.
The report also put forward that spending 800 million dollars on early-warning systems in the developing countries alone could help reduce the annual losses by up to 16 billion dollars.
“We must not stop at just preventing deaths,” said Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa. “If people survive a climate disaster but then are left to fend for themselves with their homes and livelihoods destroyed, it’s a sparse blessing.”
“It will not be easy. It will be challenging. But looking at the potential costs of mobilizing the resources to make this a reality, it’s a mere fraction, a mere rounding error of the 14 trillion dollars mobilised by G20 countries over the past two years to recover their economies from Covid 19 pandemic,” said a senior UN official during an informal briefing for media on Tuesday.
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