Sea level rise threat for several big cities.

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Sea level rise  threat for several big cities.

Underlining how climate change linked rise in sea level poses a major threat to countries like India,China, Bangladesh and the Netherlands, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said.The rise has been 4.5 mm per year during 2013-22 and it could through this century affecting not only small island nations but also big coastal cities.

    Several big cities on all continents are threatened,such as Shanghai,Dhaka, Bangkok,Jakarta,Mumbai,Maputo,Lagos,Cairo, London, Copenhagen,New York,Los Angeles,Buenos Aires and Santiago.It is a major economic, social and humanitarian challenges ",said WMO in its fact-sheet on the global sea-level rise.

   It said human influence (activities) was the main driven of the high pace of rise since 1971 compared to the rise of 1.3 mm per year between 1901-1971.Global mean sea-level has risen faster since 1900 than over any preceding century in at least the last 3000 years,said the global Met body while nothing how rising temperatures are contributing to it through melting of polar ice sheets and glaciers.

    The danger is especially acute for nearly 900 million people who live in coastal zones at low elevations - that's one out of ten persons on earth - and also for assets worth trillions of dollars (up to 14.2 trillion by 2100) within the coastal floodplains.

  "Sea level rise is not only a threat in itself.It is a threat multiplier,said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres while reacting to WMO's findings which noted how even if global heating is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100,there will still be a sizeable rise in sea level.

     Referring to NASA's findings that Antarctica is losing an average of 150 billion tons of ice mass annually and the Greenland ice cap is melting even faster by losing 270 billion tons per year, Guterres said, Consider the hundreds of millions of people living in the river basins of the Himalayas.We have already seen how Himalayan melts have worsened flooding in Pakistan".

     As these glaciers recede over the coming decades,over time,Indus,Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers will shrink.Rising sea levels combined with deep intrusion of saltwater will make large parts of their huge deltas uninhabitable, he said.