The coronavirus has taken over center stage of critical issues facing the world today. However, the climate crisis is still lurking in the background and is still as pressing as ever. Human activity may have simmered down lately, but soon enough, it will pick back up, and all those greenhouse gases will start spewing into the atmosphere once again and cause global warming – and consequently catastrophic environmental events.
COVID-19 is spreading at an alarming rate, but the ice caps are still melting, the sea level is still rising, the coral is still dying, and air pollution will rise again once factories open, meaning thousands of people will continue to die from poor air quality. Freak weather events have become more prevalent in recent years, costing nations billions of dollars in damage.
These are just a handful of the worrying indications of the looming dangers of climate change. The future of our planet and our lives depend on what we do now to tackle the phenomenon. Nowhere on Earth is safe from the changes that are happening to our climate and the problems to come if we do nothing. Of course, some regions are at higher risk than others.
That’s why a team of researchers analyzed the data from the University of Notre-Dame’s ND-Gain Index to see which countries are in the most danger from the effects of climate change. The report analyzed 181 nations on their vulnerability and how ready they are to adapt to a warming planet. Adaptation factors include things such as food supply, healthcare, and government stability.
The researchers also calculated how much carbon dioxide each country emits yearly to indicate its contribution to climate change. That way, there is a comparison between a given country’s likeliness to survive changes against its responsibility for causing it in the first place.
The report found that Norway would be the country most likely to survive climate change thanks to its low vulnerability score and high readiness score. Its neighboring countries also scored well: Finland (3rd), Sweden (4th), Denmark (6th), and Iceland (8th). The Nordic nations landed half of the spots in the top-10 climate change survivable countries!
The countries most likely to suffer and lose the battle against climate change are (not surprisingly) the planet’s poorest and least developed nations. The bottom-10 list is filled with countries in sub-Saharan Africa (including Chad, Eritrea, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo), with Somalia being the least likely to survive changes of global heating. These nations fared poorly due to poor infrastructure, unstable governance, lack of healthcare, and scarcity of food and water.
These findings highlight the need for wealthier, more established nations to support the world’s most vulnerable countries. If not because the most prosperous economies contribute the most to climate change, then because they are the least affected and can sacrifice helping out the rest of humanity that can’t help themselves. In the end, if nobody does anything, then climate change will affect the entire global community. So those that can do something to stop climate change should now before it’s too late.
