For thousands of years, people have built their great metropolises right up against the contours of coasts, in estuaries and deltas, confident of the ebb and flow of the tides. Domination of the seas allowed many coastal cities to become trading powerhouses and cultural melting pots. But now that strength is becoming a liability as climate change swells the oceans, redrawing the map and putting hundreds of millions at risk. That's the warning of an unpublished draft report by the UN's climate science advisory panel, seen exclusively by AFP, which outlines the vast and urgent climate threats facing the planet. From the air, you can see the problem. In city upon city, office towers, warehouses and homes crowd the water's edge as if they are jostling to take a dip, major roads hug the shore, landing strips jut dauntlessly into the frothing waves. These cities are on the "frontline", the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report says. "Difficult choices will need to be made as sea level continues to rise, floods and storm surges become more frequent and intense, warming increases ocean acidity and intensifies heatwaves," it adds. Rising seas will likely spark mass migration and eventually force whole cities to be abandoned to the flood. But profound consequences for megacities, small islands, arctic communities and deltas will come long before that - well within the lifetimes of most alive today. In some places, people already know all too well the destructive power of water. "I once was a bride of an affluent family," Yasmin Begum tells AFP in the bare corrugated metal hut she now shares with her relatives in the Bangladesh capital Dhaka. "My in-laws and parents, they had everything - cattle, nice house, farmland. But the river took it all away." The family had lived a relatively prosperous life in the southern island district of Bhola, an exposed tendril of land at the outer... |