Asia faces floods, drought, disease: UN panel

PARIS: Countries across Asia face heightened risk of flooding, severe water shortages, infectious disease and hunger from global warming, the UN's top climate experts say in a massive report to be unveiled next week.

Shrinking freshwater supplies aggravated by population growth and rising standards of living will 'very likely, ' a 90 per cent certainty, "adversely affect more than a billion people in Asia by the 2050s," the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns.

Among the most vulnerable are three,  the Yangtze, the Yellow River, and the Zhujiang -- in China, the Red River delta in northern Vietnam, and especially the low-lying Ganges-Brahmaputra delta in Bangladesh.

In the Himalayas, which feed rivers flowing into southern China as well as South and Southeast Asia, glaciers less than four kilometres (2.5 miles) long are projected to disappear entirely if average global temperatures rise by 3 C (5.4 F)

By 2080, the report says, it is likely that 1.1 to 3.2 billion people worldwide will experience water scarcity, 200 to 600 million will suffer from hunger, and each year an additional two to seven million people will be victims of coastal flooding.

Even modest rises in sea levels, caused by warming ocean surface temperatures and melting ice caps, will cause flooding and economic disruption is many of the region's densely-populated mega-deltas.

If current warming trends continue, the area covered by central Asia's glaciers is likely to shrink by four-fifths from 500,000 square kilometres.