Climate change to hit Asia's poor hardest: W.Bank - Yahoo! News

Climate change to hit Asia's poor hardest: W.Bank - Yahoo! News

Asia's poor will bear the brunt of disasters sparked by climate change and rapid urbanisation, a World Bank expert told a regional conference Tuesday.

"More than others, poor people pay for disaster with their lives," the bank's director for sustainable development in East Asia, John Roome, told the Asian ministerial conference on disaster risk reduction.

Last year, he said in a speech, six of the 10 countries with the highest death rates and GDP losses from natural disasters were in Asia.

And since 1997, 82 percent of all lives lost in disasters were in countries represented at the meeting in the city of Incheon west of Seoul.

"Climate change, coupled with unprecedented rates of rapid urbanisation, makes the potential impacts of disasters much worse," Roome said, noting that the frequency and intensity of climate-related disasters had quadrupled in the past two decades.

Citing OECD estimates, Roome said Asia is home to six of the 10 most vulnerable cities -- Guangzhou, Shanghai, Ho Chi Minh, Mumbai, Kolkata and Osaka.