<mark>already warmer, on average, than developed regions, and they also suffer from high rainfall variability....Second, developing countries - in particular the poorest - are heavily dependent on agriculture, the most climate-sensitive of all economic sectors, and suffer from inadequate health provision and low-quality public services. Third, their low incomes and vulnerabilities make adaptation to climate change particularly difficult....At a national level, climate change will cut revenues and raise spending needs, worsening public finances.” (Stern 2006:vii of summary)</mark> Modeling the effects of climate change is subject to much uncertainty, but there is considerable consensus on its broad effects, some of which are summarized below.

- (a) **_Food and water_** .   Global warming will reduce crop outputs at lower latitudes, undermining food security in the developing world.  If temperatures rise further global food output will decrease,<sup>5</sup> reducing the developing world’s access to imported food.

Around a third of the world’s population lives in countries with moderate to high water stress (Stern 2006:63), often exacerbated by poor management of water resources (World Bank 2007:183). Rising demand for agriculture and other purposes will heighten water scarcity.

Climate change is also expected to disrupt rainfall patterns, threatening agricultural cycles and human lives with droughts and floods. These changes will affect most the poorest billion people in the world, 75 percent of whom live in rural areas and rely on agriculture for their livelihood (Stern 2006: 67).

- (b) **_Health and Human Capital:_** Climate change is increasing morbidity and mortality from malnutrition, vector-borne<sup>6</sup> and diarrhoeal diseases − and children are the most affected (McMichael et al 2004). This can have lasting consequences for human capital: a study in Zimbabawe found that young children who became stunted as a result of a drought faced long-term negative effects on school attainment and subsequent earnings (Alderman et al 2006).

- (c) **_Natural disasters:_** The frequency of natural disasters is expected to increase, affecting and even displacing large numbers of people.  Low-lying coastal areas will become increasingly uninhabitable, subject to flooding and hurricanes. Sea level rise will bring salinization, salt water intrusion in groundwater aquifers, and in some areas complete inundation (WDR 2008:200).

Many countries in the most affected regions have poor preventive health systems, with low capacity for averting and controlling disease outbreaks even during routine conditions. Such capacity becomes especially critical when faced with natural disasters (Das Gupta et al 2009).

- (d) **_Conflicts_** .  The pace of internal and international migration will rise with the combined pressures of climate change, population growth, and environmental degradation (Laczko and Aghazarm 2009, World Bank 2010, Gemenne 2011), and the migrants may not always be welcomed by people who may themselves feel under pressure.  Migration from Bangladesh into parts of Northeast India has led to low-level conflict for decades, and this could be exacerbated if the densely-populated megadeltas of the Bay of Bengal are inundated by sea level rise.  Land degradation and drought have already caused much movement of people in

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