ABSTRACT
Anthropogenic climate change is most often described in temporal terms as a threat to future generations. However, climate change is already a real and present spatial threat to generations and species as extreme climate events and rising land and ocean temperatures are already harming the spaces of humans and other species in equatorial and sub-equatorial Africa and Asia and in parts of the Americas and Australasia. In Bangladesh, temperatures have risen by two degrees centigrade in the last thirty years, reflecting a rise in the temperature of the Indian Ocean in the same period. This rise has seen reductions in the former four-season pattern to two. And, as the dry season has lengthened, the land bakes and, when more intensive rains fall in a heavier monsoon, the land cannot absorb the rain. Combined with strengthening storms, this is leading to growing numbers of people displaced or killed by rising flood waters in the wet season.1 Glacial melting of the Himalayan glaciers threatens even more flooding. These glaciers store one quarter of the world’s fresh water, and one fifth of the world’s peoples drink and irrigate their crops with the melt water. As the glaciers melt faster, they bring increased flooding. This will be followed by reduced river flow, drought, and declines in crop production across much of South Asia.
