“Amnesty International and Greenpeace International: With the impacts of climate change rapidly enfolding, the risk of displacement may soon reach catastrophic proportions – storms, floods, sea level rise, droughts, will impact an even larger number of people, all around the world.” (Joint Statement: Greenpeace – Amnesty International. December 8th 2015).
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Note from author: When I drafted this post about a month ago (created an illustrated presentation about climate change using a number of sources, including Amnesty International and Greenpeace International), there were yet no signs of hurricanes Harvey or Irma, that hit coastal areas in Texas, U.S.A., the Caribbean and Florida hard in the past three weeks. Natural disasters are more common in some places around the world. These have a common denomination: climate hot spots.
What we witnessed in 2004 in South East Asia, perhaps the worst tsunami throughout history of mankind, hit not only a number of countries in South East Asia including Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia, but also affected many countries indirectly, especially with all the tourists visiting the countries that were hit by the massive tsunami in 2004 that caused at least 250.000 human deaths, and who knows how many animals on land, and underwater. The lessons learned from this catastrophic event that shocked everyone around the world included the fact that the countries that were hit by the tsunami, since then introduced early warning systems. Nevertheless, rebuilding a society after a major natural disaster takes time, and we can only guess what kinds of traumas these kinds of events leave in people.
Nothing in comparison with the South East Asian tsunami in 2004, we experience more and more floods and rain in Europe too. In 2016, a good old friend of mine who lives in Germany, personally told me about floods in Nordrhein-Westfalen, and how devastated citizens were since they felt that they did not receive the support they needed from the state. In Finland too, we have had increasingly much rain, wind, and floods this year. So far it seems like this is no major problem, but if glaciers keep melting at the current pace, causing more rainfall around the world, what can we expect?
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Anne-Maria Yritys 