Climate change and water are closely related. The world’s water is impacted by climate change in plenty of ways. For the most part, the effects of climate change are related to water: decreasing ice sheets, rising sea levels, droughts, floods, and unpredictable rainfall patterns are all examples.
Rising temperatures are upsetting the pattern of precipitation and the entire water cycle, which is making water scarcity and water-related dangers (such as floods and droughts) worse (UNICEF).
The global sea level has risen over 20 cm in the last century, and in the last 20 years, the rate has more than doubled. 10% of the global population lives in a coastal zone with low elevation, putting cities like London, Shanghai, and New York, as well as small island states, at great risk of flooding, leading to potential mass refugee events.
The UNEP committee is going to discuss it further today and will try to find a way to stop it.
During the opening statements, all the delegates agreed that this issue must be solved, given the global suffering it is causing. People were forced to leave their homes and fly away to a place they didn’t know all about because no one has done anything about this topic until now.
The UN has been working for years to reduce the impacts of climate change, which would include rising sea levels. But they never managed to bring this topic up in a daily discussion. The UNEP itself leads the charge for raising awareness about environmental issues, while UN Oceans is dedicated to protecting the seas.
“We all know that the cause of this problem is the greenhouse. The more greenhouse gases are trapped on earth, the higher the temperature on the planet, but that is not the only reason. In order to approve this proposal, we proposed to give a system that is free from electricity to countries that do not have access to clean water,” said the delegation of Turkey.
About two billion people worldwide don’t have access to safe drinking water today, and roughly half of the world’s population is experiencing severe water scarcity for at least part of the year.
Indeed, this is one of the effects of people not having access to clean water. Yet, I believe that if we want to address this topic more clearly, we need to address the cause of it. Like greenhouse gas emissions, thermal expansion, and even groundwater-to-rain conversion.
If this committee were to dig more into those topics and get a better perspective on them, I highly believe they would try to stop this crisis and help the people around us. Because if we don’t, no one will.
Adi Lahmi, Press director
