Greenpeace Climate News

Environmental Disaster Council Capitulates
Immediate aid only in exceptional cases

In future the United Nations Environmental Disaster Council will only be able to provide immediate aid in exceptional cases when there are floods, storms or droughts. "We have no choice but to capitulate in the face of the dramatically increasing number of natural disasters resulting from the worldwide change in climate," admitted Richard Warmer, spokesperson for the Council, a body set up by the UN Security Council, in New York. The majority of the member states were behind Photo of Flood with their payments, and many had also withdrawn their contingent from the Disaster Corps. Warmer presented a devastating resumee of the past year. "The horrors entered a new dimension in 2019," he said. Never had so many tornados crossed the USA.

"It's we who are the real disaster"
- A wise person, 1995

Several big floods struck the Mediterranean countries. The number of hurricanes was five times what it had been in the year 2000. As a result of Windstorm Steve, for example, ten thousand people on the Caribbean islands lost their lives and four million became homeless. After the storm, epidemics spread.

For months health systems were in a state of collapse, and clean drinking water was in short supply. "We almost completely used up emergency reserves in supplying food to those affected in the Caribbean and other regions hit by storms," Richard Warmer reported. The urgently needed international food aid had not materialised because a persistent drought in the USA and extremely heavy rains in the United States of Europe had ruined harvests.

The evacuation of the Kiribati Pacific island group last year also took its toll. With the islands faced by terrific floods, the UN Disas- ter Corps evacuated the atolls' 120,000 inhabitants at the request of the small island states' alliance, AOSIS. The evacuees are to find a new home in North-east New Zealand.

The UN Disaster Council appealed to the United States of Europe to open its borders to more environmental refugees. For some two weeks now the USE authorities have been refusing entry to several thousand Egyptians drifting on ships off the Italian coast, having fled from the drought - and floods -in their land. The USE Asylum Minister, Pierre de Coeur, said a few days ago that the refugee camps were absolutely overcrowded. "It is therefore unreasonable, on humanitarian grounds," said de Coeur, "to allow still more people entry."

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