Another UN report on global warming lists serious implications for NZ

By ANNE BESTON

Disease-carrying mosquitoes will thrive in New Zealand but agriculture could benefit from global warming at least for a while, an influential group of the world's scientists say.

A United Nations report issued yesterday also warns of devastating storms in some parts of the world, and climbing sea levels as temperatures rise over the next century.

The 1000-page report, Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, comes after two years of study by the UN's powerful Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, set up in 1988.

It follows the panel's report on the causes of global warming, issued last month. The new report was adopted after wrangling over its contents, particularly from oil producer Saudi Arabia which wanted it "watered down," said New Zealand scientist Professor Blair Fitzharris of Otago University, who was one of the report's leading authors.

Dr David Wratt of the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, another contributing author, said Australia and New Zealand would be prone to droughts in eastern areas, while western areas could be hit by a 1-in-50-year flood every 25 years.

Tropical diseases would become more common, Dr Wratt said. Agriculture could benefit as it would become possible to grow crops such as kiwifruit as far south as Nelson. But longer-term effects would be the loss of unique native species and devastating coastal erosion.

Antarctica's western ice sheet and the Greenland ice sheet are vulnerable to melting, the report says.

Scientists suspect the degradation of both ice sheets will begin in the next 100 years but Professor Fitzharris said a full-scale melt-down would take hundreds rather than dozens of years.

Herald Online feature: Climate change

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

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Summary: Climate Change 2001

United Nations Environment Program

World Meteorological Organisation

Framework Convention on Climate Change