The president of the World Bank says global warming is a real risk to the planet and is already affecting the world’s economy.
Speaking to the G20 finance ministers at their meeting in Moscow the president, Dr Jim Yong Kim, urged governments to “tackle the serious challenges presented by climate change. These are not just risks. They represent real consequences.”
Dr Kim said failing to tackle these challenges risked “serious consequences for the economic outlook… Damages and losses from natural disasters have more than tripled over the past 30 years,” he said. “Years of development efforts are often wiped out in days or even minutes,” and climate change was “a very real and present danger”.
Dr Kim said issues around climate change “do not typically come before finance ministers and central bank governors. This, I firmly believe, is a mistake. And to underscore my point, we need to look no farther than what is happening in our host country.
“This winter, for instance, Moscow has had record snowfalls. Climate scientists tell us that as the Earth warms up we will have more and more bursts of precipitation and other periods of extreme weather.
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