Top 10 Places Already Affected by Climate Change

Catastrophic effects of global warming are being felt from the deserts of Darfur to the island nation of Kiribati

Uganda In some places, efforts to address global warming are having a bigger impact than the changing climate itself. In the Mount Elgon National Park in eastern Uganda, a Dutch nonprofit group was reforesting the park's perimeter, earning carbon credits for airline passengers looking to make up for their emissions, and reinvesting the revenues to plant more trees... © Andy Aitchison/Corbis
The Alps According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Alps have been warming at roughly three times the global average, and projections show more to come. Alpine glaciers are in retreat, and mountain plants are migrating upward in pursuit of cooler temperatures... © Associated Press
The Northwest Passage The melting of the Arctic has spurred a geopolitical race, as Russia, Norway, the U.S., Canada and Denmark press competing claims for the top of the world. But whereas the competition is in part driven by the promises of undiscovered metal, minerals and petroleum, the melting ice is already uncovering another valuable resource: the waves underneath it... © Associated Press
Washington, D.C. According to the Red Cross, environmental disasters displace more people than war. The London-based Christian Aid estimates that by 2050, floods, droughts and famine caused by climate change will have driven 250 million people from their homes--more than the 163 million people currently displaced by wars, famine or ecological disasters... ©iStockphoto.com/Joseph C. Justice Jr.
Advertisement
Island nations Last summer, the tiny Pacific island nation of Kiribati became the first country to declare that global warming is rendering its lands uninhabitable, asking for help in evacuating its population... © George Steinmetz/Corbis
Great Barrier Reef Not all the carbon dioxide we emit contributes to atmospheric warming. More than a third of what we have produced since the industrial revolution has been absorbed by the oceans, where it reacts with seawater to form carbonic acid... ©Associated Press
Northern Europe The warming of the globe has so far generally been good for the world's wine. It has allowed the fruit to come off the vine richer and riper. A study led by Gregory Jones, a climatologist at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Ore., and the son of a winegrower, tracked the impact of rising temperatures between 1950 and 1999, using as a measure of quality the values by the auction house Sotheby's, which rates wines on a 100-point scale... © Grand Tour/Corbis
Italy In August 2007, an epidemic swept through Castiglione di Cervia, a small village in northern Italy. More than 100 of the town's 2,000 residents came down with high fever, rashes and crushing pain in their bones and joints... ©iStockphoto.com/Yuriy Sukhovenko
Advertisement
The Gulf Coast Climate scientists may still be debating to what extent climate change is going to translate into stronger and more frequent hurricanes, but insurance companies aren't waiting for the final answer... © Smiley N. Pool/Dallas Morning News/Corbis
Darfur Until the rains failed in Darfur, the region's pastoralists lived amicably with the settled farmers. The nomadic herders grazed their camels on the rocky hillsides between the fertile plots and fed their animals on the leavings from the harvest... © Lynsey Addario/Corbis

Newsletter

Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter.