Climate change will not only hit drier cities like the Indian capital but also modify the migration patterns of rural and urban areas, warns a UN report released Wednesday.
"Much of the environmental refugees never return to the rural areas from which they were first displaced," says the 'State of the World Population 2007' report of the United Nations Population Fund (Unfpa)."Drought, flooding and the other consequences of climate change can also modify migration patterns between rural and urban areas, or within urban areas," says the report.
"Severe floods in the Yangtze Basin in 1998 and 2002, caused by a combination of climate variability and human-induced land-cover changes, displaced millions of people, mainly subsistence farmers and villagers," it says.
"Similar examples can be seen in India, Mexico and other poor countries."The report says the impact of climate change on urban water supplies were likely to be dramatic and several developing countries already faced accumulated lack of water supply, distribution, quality and discrimination.
"The recent report of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate change underlines that cities in drier regions such as Karachi and New Delhi will be particularly hard hit."
Source-Eurekalert
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