UN panel to hammer out consensus on global-warming impact[fr][de] 

Melting glaciers, rising sea levels, heatwaves, droughts - the effects of rising global temperatures are already widely felt around the world. 

But the poorest nations are set to suffer more, and are the least prepared to cope with the expected consequences, climate scientists will warn on 6 April 2007.

Members of the IPCC, a United Nations network of around 2,500 scientists, are meeting behind closed doors in Brussels on 2-6 April to finalise a summary report on the expected consequences that global warming will have on world populations and ecosystems.

Among them are increasing poverty, drinking-water rarefaction, melting glaciers and polar ice, as well as species extinction, all expected to happen by mid-century if nothing is done to mitigate the effects.

The meeting will involve around 50 scientists and 285 delegates from 124 countries as well as observers from business and environmental groups.

The report, on 'Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability', is the second in a series of four to be issued this year as part of the IPCC's fourth assessment report (AR4). Apart from a comprehensive analysis of how climate change is affecting natural and human systems, the report will also try to predict what the impacts will be in the future and how far adaptation and mitigation can reduce them.

But more controversial will be part D of the report, on "assessment of responses to impacts". A chapter outline speaks of relations between adaptation and mitigation, and considers the economic costs of damage and benefits gained by taking action.

A summary of the first part of the full report, on the physical-science basis of climate change, was agreed on 2 February in Paris. For the first time since the IPCC’s previous report in 2001, it concluded with near certainty (more than 90%) that human activity such as fossil fuel burning were at the root of global warming (EurActiv 2/02/07).