What will be the impact of climate change on Southeast Asia?
Climate change might affect Southeast Asia more severely than almost any other part of the world. The problems are manifold. First, on the mainland, millions of people rely on the great rivers that flow down from the Himalayas – the Mekong, the Irrawaddy, the Red River and the Salween, among others. The regular flow of these rivers is projected to change catastrophically because the Himalayan glaciers are melting at a very rapid rate. At current rates, the glaciers will have completely vanished within the next two or three decades. This will be disastrous as first floods will come and then drought. Floods are an endemic problem across the region and their effects have been intensified in the modern age by the extensive deforestation that has taken place as people have cut down the trees to sell them, often illegally. After the floods will come drought as the water supply dries up. The fifty million people who rely upon the River Mekong in its downstream stretches below will all be very badly affected. Nearly all of the region relies upon wet paddy rice fields to grow rice and there would need to be changes to this if there is no water to be had. That would at least relieve the problem of the methane released into the atmosphere by the paddy fields: methane is an even more extreme contributor to the greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide.
In addition to the glacier issue, Southeast Asia must face the threat to its many islands. There are some 30,000 islands in the Southeast Asian archipelago – they have never been properly counted and mapped. Many of these islands are very low in the water and, once the expected rise in the levels of the oceans takes place, many of those islands will be inundated and human life there will become unsustainable.
Third, new requirements to reduce carbon emissions are likely to affect Southeast Asian nations before they reach the level of economic development which they would otherwise have been able to reach. As developing nations, most Southeast Asian countries were not obliged to abide by the provisions of the Kyoto Protocol, although eight of the countries did at least sign up to the treaty. However, this situation will change in the future as new agreements require all countries to abide by future international agreements. The problem for countries like Indonesia, Thailand and even now Vietnam, is that their major cities have carbon footprints at least comparable to those of developed nations while the majority of those nations still live in electricity-free poverty.
