The National Economic, Environment And Development Studies (Needs) For Climate Change Project (Final Report) Lebanon - Ifi Report

IFI Report | January 2011
The National Economic, Environment and Development Studies (NEEDS) for Climate Change Project (Final Report) Lebanon Nadim Farajalla, Marcus Marktanner, Leila Dagher, and Philippe Zgheib
Climate change has become an accepted reality. Its impacts have been recorded and documented throughout the world. The Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) in Belgium has recorded 39 climatologic disasters1 for Western Asia since 1969. Twelve disasters were recorded in the year 2000 alone. The majority of these disasters were droughts (16), followed by extreme temperatures (14), and wildfires (9). People’s livelihood is mostly challenged by droughts, which have affected more than 51 million people in Western Asia in the last 40 years (CRED, 2009). The damage associated with all climatologic events is estimated at more than $1.4 billion. Most of these costs occurred after 1990. Lebanon has only one entry in the CRED database, which is for 2007 under the wildfire category. Although the record indicates that no persons had been affected and no damage occurred, existing climate change models predict that the risk of climatologic disasters is increasing.