Again and again, severe weather events wreak havoc around the globe and thus tend to dominate international newspaper headlines. No continent has been spared with the strongest storms swirling both in the Pacific and Atlantic basins, in addition to extreme droughts and massive floods geographically well diversified. Knock-on effects seem straightforward and include spread of disease in devastated areas, further stress on perhaps already deteriorating economic conditions on the ground, and – if governance and logistics are already problematic – even political instability as a consequence of such natural disasters can occur. So, the lines to the security realm become increasingly blurred.

Source: NOAA, National Climatic Data Center; enlarge here. 

These findings help change public perception about climate change and drive the urgency of the UN climate talks in Lima (Peru), where UN negotiators from over 190 countries take further steps to get a viable agreement ready to be signed in Paris 2015 at COP 21.

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The World Bank recently released the latest scientific climate analysis in a new report tellingly entitled “Turn Down theHeat” with a focus on “the risks of climate change to development in Latin America and the Caribbean, the MiddleEast and North Africa, and parts of Europe and Central Asia.” The report calls for immediate action based on perhaps it’s main and alarming finding “that even with very ambitious mitigation action, warming close to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by mid-century is already locked into the Earth’s atmospheric system, and climate change impacts such as extreme heat events may now be unavoidable.” Read the entire exhaustive World Bank report here.

The following World Bank infographic provides a great overview of the main talking points in the report along with recommendations of how to avoid “many of the worst projected climate impacts”:

Source: World Bank