“They asked us to speed up draining water from the plants.
If it could be done in one to two months, the company expected
to then take about four to six months months for repairs. This
will cause them a loss of about 80 billion in HDD exports,”
Wannarat said.
Increased hunger due to food yield changes will lead to malnutrition; water scarcity will deteriorate hygiene; pollution will weaken immune systems; and displacement and social disorder due to conflicts over water and land will increase the spread of infectious diseases, they said.By 2050, there could be 70 million additional deaths in sub-Saharan Africa alone, said Tony McMichael, professor of population health at the Australian National University.As mosquito species spread due to climate change, the transmission rate of diseases like malaria will increase, engulfing countries like Zimbabwe from 2025 to 2050.An extra 21 million people in China could be at risk from the infectious disease schistosomiasis as global warming increases floods, enabling disease-carrying water snails to travel to new areas.”Climate change will progressively weaken the Earth’s life support mechanism,” McMichael said. “Health is not just collateral damage on the side, the risk is central and represents a denouement of all the other effects of climate change.”The world’s population is due to exceed 7 billion this month and is forecast to rise to over 10 billion by 2050, putting even more strain on global resources.The effects of climate change will only exacerbate the problems, putting the health of ecosystems, animal species and humans in danger, the experts said.EUROPEHealth effects will not just be felt in Africa or Asia — Europe will also feel the consequences.”The problem of over-consumption in high income countries has produced an ecological and financial debt,” Ian Roberts, professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told Reuters.”The biggest risk to human health is from the rise in fossil fuel use, causing cardiovascular disease, stroke and cancer,” he added.Europe will also be at risk from heat waves, floods and more infectious diseases as pests shift to northern latitudes, said Sari Kovats, lead author of the Europe chapter for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) fifth assessment report.”The fact is, there is more evidence that diseases are moving north such as bluetongue,” she told Reuters.The IPCC’s next report, which is due out in 2013-2014, will include chapters on human security and livelihoods and poverty for the first time to reflect the new raft of scientific evidence, she added.Human health is not only at risk. Animal and plant species are also endangered.”Many species are already facing a raft of pressures and climate change is creating a new range of additional problems,” said Paul Pearce-Kelly, senior curator at London’s Zoological Society.Around 15 to 37 percent of over 6,000 species of amphibia are predicted to become extinct by 2100, he said.In the Earth’s history, there have been five mass extinctions, but there is now a 10,000-fold faster extinction rate than at any time on record.”We are losing three species an hour, and this is before climate change is doing anything,” said Hugh Montgomery, director at University College London’s institute for human health and performance.
The Marietta, Georgia-based company makes paperboard
packaging for food, beverage and other consumer products.The company said the closure will have little to
no impact on current or future orders.Graphic Packaging, whose customers include ConAgra Foods
, Pepsi and Kraft , said it will move
business from the La Porte plant to other facilities in the
United States.Graphic Packaging’s shares closed at $3.86 on Tuesday on the
New York Stock Exchange.
* Sees 2011 growth at a standstill, contraction in 2012* Govt has opportunity to avert problem getting worseNICOSIA, Oct 12 (Reuters) - Cyprus must take swift action to
shore up its economy, the IMF warned on Wednesday, saying it
faced strong economic headwinds and substantial downside risks
which were likely to persist.”We think the situation at the moment is very serious. The
fact that the government cannot access the capital markets is
very serious and the risks to the banking sector compound that,”
said Erik Jan de Vrijer, assistant director of the IMF’s
European Department.”The first priority for Cyprus is to do all it can to avoid
that these problems get out of hand.”Worries have grown that Cyprus’s tiny economy would be the
fourth in the euro zone to need a bailout since a July munitions
explosion crippled its largest power plant. De Vrijer was
responding to a question on whether it could at any point
require such aid.”I think that there is time, and there is opportunity for
the government to take decisive action to avert the possibility
of these problems getting worse and worse,” he said.Cyprus’s credit ratings have suffered from exposure of its
banking sector to Greek debt and fiscal slippage domestically,
pushing up the cost of it borrowing on financial markets.Last week, the island’s cabinet said it had given its
finance minister the go-ahead to take a 2.5 billion euro loan
from Russia to refinance maturing debt.De Vrijer said the best way authorities could restore
confidence was to make a “large upfront reduction” in their
fiscal deficit next year.Measures to achieve fiscal savings should focus mostly on
expenditure reductions, which experience has shown provide more
durable savings than tax increases, the IMF said.The Fund expected “little if any growth” this year, and to
register a small contraction in 2012, it said.In February, the IMF had issued a markedly more upbeat
scenario of growth of between 1.5 and 2.0 percent for this year.Asked what had prompted the radical revision, De Vrijer said
a July 11 munitions blast which destroyed Cyprus’s largest power
station had an impact. “But far the most important one is the
financial turbulence in Europe and the diminished growth
prospects in North America and Europe (which) are having an
impact on Cyprus.”
