International Charity Christian Aid released a new report on climate change which says Mumbai and Kolkata are in the top list of cities with most prone to coastal flooding. In this report, it underlines how the most carbon emitting countries are major cities with induced risks.
It is explained how these cities are exposed to coastal flooding by 2060 in which major cities from the US, China and India are included. This flooding may happen with the combination of sea level rise comes to the extreme level.
The 2070 projections are supported by the inter governmental panel on climate change where the people from Kolkata and Mumbai are mostly exposed to these flooding with 14 million to 11.4 million respectively.
“We’re facing a head-on collision between the growth of coastal urban areas and climate change which makes coastal flooding more likely. This perfect storm is likely to bring about a heavy human and financial toll unless we do something about it,” she said.
“Although the financial cost to cities in rich countries will be crippling, the wealthy will at least have options to relocate and receive insurance protection. Evidence shows that from New Orleans to Dhaka, it is the poorest who are most vulnerable because they have the worst infrastructure and no social or financial safety nets to help them recover,” she added.
Dr. Doig: “There is a chance this horrifying vision of the future can be avoided. It is striking that the cities facing the most severe impacts are in countries with high contributions of carbon emissions. The first thing we can do is speed up the global transition away from dirty fossil fuels to the clean, a renewable energy of the future.”
He also said, “This would go some way to help protect people in these cities now, and alleviate the threat for the billion vulnerable at risk from coastal flooding by 2060.”
“In the UK, we’ve experienced in recent years the winter flooding that has left large parts of the country deluged. But these figures show that it’s not just more rainfall we need to be wary of. The people living along our coastlines will become vulnerable to rising tides unless we do something about climate change.”