Fiercer storm surges brought on by climate change will claim the most land in Latin America, uproot the most people in the Middle East and wreak the greatest economic destruction in East Asia, new research finds.
Economists with the World Bank's energy and environment research team say worsening weather threatens 52 million people, more than 29,000 square kilometers of agricultural land, and 9 percent of coastal nations' gross domestic product (GDP) across the globe.
If they are not shared with more protected countries, the burdens will be grotesquely uneven. Some countries, like the Bahamas, could see more than more than half the coastal GDP swept away. Others, like Namibia, could lose half their coastal land but suffer a somewhat smaller financial blow.
The coastal economic hit to China, meanwhile, is enormous in actual dollars -- about $31.2 billion. Far smaller is the projected financial ruin to the Philippines' coastal economy, about $4.2 billion. But the losses represent 17 percent of China's coastal economy and more than 52 percent of the Philippines', the authors found.
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