Page 12 - MONTT LATIN AMERICAN MAGAZINE, AUGUST 2021 (English)

Climate Change in Latin America
The worst region in the world, in terms of climate change, is Latin America, where the drought worsens as a result of the res in the Amazon, whose soot ends up melting the glaciers, raising the sea level and generating devastating changes in industrial shing and in populations near the oceans. According to the IDB, the solution is a change in the productive paradigm, the decarbonization of the economies of the subcontinent, which would create 15 million new jobs in 2030, among other bene ts. Not everyone agrees with this diagnosis.
América Latin America is one of the regions of the world most a ected by climate change. For the time being, it already claimed 312,000 lives and a ected more than 277 million people between 1998 and 2020. Experts say that three million will soon fall into extreme poverty. This, among other things, due to a 20 percent reduction in crop yields and the impact on both industrial and artisanal shing, plus the rise in sea level and its acidi cation that is destroying the coasts at a dizzying rate and expelling marine species of great economic value towards the poles.
Not surprisingly, about 1,7 percent of Gross Domestic Product, GDP, is lost each year due to weather-related disasters. In Uruguay, for example, droughts and the destruction of plantations and loss of livestock cost around 0,8 percent of GDP, in 2018 alone.
This is established by di erent reports released recently, especially one that constituted “a red alert for Humanity” and “a path of no return” if the abuses committed by human beings are not put to an end now.
The most important report is the sixth produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the main international body for evaluating this issue, established by the
United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988.
234 experts from 66 countries participated in the current evaluation, reviewing more than 14,000 articles and references published so far.
Chilling Details
There, a disturbing panorama of climate risks and their consequences in the world and in the subcontinent is detailed. Among others:
• 2020 was one of the three warmest years on record in Mexico / Central America and the Caribbean and the second warmest in South America.
• The intense drought in the southern Amazon and the Pantanal was the most serious in the last 60 years and had a strong impact on the rest of the Region, with a devastating drought that resulted in the deterioration of inland navigation routes and the food production. • In the Chilean and Argentine Andes, glaciers have retreated in recent decades in an impressive and visible manner, a loss that began 10 years ago in line with an increase in temperatures and a considerable reduction in annual rainfall in the Region.
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