NEW DELHI: Climate change under a high-end emissions scenario could lead to a 16.9% loss in GDP by 2070 across the Asia and Pacific region, with India projected to suffer a 24.7% GDP loss, according to a new report. Rising sea levels and decreasing labour productivity would drive the most significant losses, with lower-income and fragile economies being hit the hardest, it said. The new research, presented in the inaugural issue of ADB‘s “Asia-Pacific Climate Report”, details a series of damaging impacts threatening the region.
It says that if the climate crisis continues to accelerate, up to 300 million people in the region could be at risk from coastal inundation, and trillions of dollars’ worth of coastal assets could face annual damage by 2070.
“Climate change has supercharged the devastation from tropical storms, heat waves, and floods in the region, contributing to unprecedented economic challenges and human suffering,” said ADB president Masatsugu Asakawa.
Urgent, well-coordinated climate action addressing these impacts is necessary before it is too late, he said.
This climate report provides insights into financing urgent adaptation needs and offers promising policy recommendations to governments in our developing member countries on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the lowest cost, he added. “By 2070, climate change under a high-end emissions scenario could cause a total loss of 16.9% of GDP across the Asia and Pacific region. Most of the region would face more than 20%. The report said that developing Asia has accounted for most of the increase in global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions since 2000. While advanced economies were major GHG emitters throughout the 20th century, emissions from Asia have risen more rapidly than those from any other region in the first two decades of the 21st century.
“Consequently, the region’s share of global emissions rose from 29.4% in 2000 to 45.9% in 2021… Emissions from Asia continue to rise, driven primarily by China, which contributed about 30 per cent of global emissions in 2021,” the ADB report said.The report pointed out that the region is home to 60 per cent of the world’s population, with per capita emissions still below the global average.
Intensified and more variable rainfall, along with increasingly extreme storms, will lead to more frequent landslides and floods in the region, it said. “This will be most pronounced in mountainous and steeply sloped areas, such as the border area of India and China, where landslides may increase by 30%-70% under 4.7 degrees Celsius of mean global warming,” it said.
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