LONDON: Four in five cities across the world are facing significant climate hazards such as heatwaves, floods and droughts, data from environmental disclosure non-profit CDP showed on Thursday.

CDP’s report “Protecting People and the Planet” surveyed 998 cities from across the globe and showed that in addition to 80pc facing extreme climate events, for nearly a third, climate-related hazards threaten at least 70pc of their populations.

Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) is a London-based non-profit organisation that runs a disclosure system for companies, cities and states worldwide to report the environmental impact of their operations. It said nearly two-thirds of cities expect the hazards faced to become more intense in future, while more than half anticipate them becoming more frequent by 2025.

Among numerous cities hit so far this year are Karachi in Pakistan, where devastating flooding has killed nearly 1,700 people, and Fort Myers in Florida, where Hurricane Ian killed more than 100 people. The elderly, those in low-income households, children and marginalised minority communities were most exposed, and policymakers needed to reflect the needs of citizens when planning their response to the climate crisis.

“Putting people at the heart of climate action, from planning to implementation, improves lives,” said CDP Acting Global Director, Maia Kutner.

Almost two-thirds of cities were taking at least one people-centred course of climate action and seeing benefits, the report showed, including better health and social protections, economic enhancements and environmental improvement.

However, not all cities can adopt such approaches and the NGO said greater financial support from governments was required to enable environmentally sound initiatives and regulations.

More than half of the cities reported facing obstacles in achieving their emissions-reduction goals, with fiscal capacity the most common hurdle, according to the report.

World at risk of record hunger

Amin Ahmed adds from Islamabad: The World Food Programme (WFP) has warned that the world is at risk of yet another year of record hunger as the global food crisis continues to drive yet more people into worsening levels of acute food insecurity.

In a call for urgent action to address the root cause of the today’s crisis ahead of World Food Day (Oct 16), WFP says the global food crisis is a confluence of competing crises — caused by climate shocks, conflict, and economic pressures — that has pushed the number of hungry people around the world from 282 million to 345 million in just the first months of 2022.

WFP scaled up food assistance targets to reach a record 153 million people in 2022, and by mid-year we had already delivered assistance to 111.2 million people. Floods have devastated homes and farmland in several countries, most strikingly in Pakistan. Anticipatory action must be at the core of the humanitarian response to protect the most vulnerable from these shocks — and a core part of the agenda at the 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27) next month in Egypt.

Meanwhile, governments’ ability to respond is constrained by their own economic woes — currency depreciation, inflation, debt distress — as the threat of global recession also mounts. This will see an increasing number of people unable to afford food and needing humanitarian support to meet their basic needs. So far this year, WFP has increased assistance six-fold in Sri Lanka in res­ponse to the economic crisis, launched an emergency flood response in Pak­istan, and expanded operations to rec­ords levels in Somalia as famine looms.

Published in Dawn, October 14th, 2022