What could Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary-General be referring to? Is it hunger? Disease? Poverty? No, I’m afraid it’s climate change:

Climate change is already killing 300,000 people a year in a “silent crisis”
that is seriously affecting hundreds of millions more, an influential humanitarian group warned today.

A report by the Global Humanitarian Forum, led by Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary-General, says that the effects of climate change are growing in such a way that it will have a serious impact on 600 million people, almost ten per cent of the world’s population, within 20 years. Almost all of these will be in developing countries.

“Climate change is the greatest emerging humanitarian challenge of our time, causing suffering to hundreds of millions of people worldwide,” Mr Annan said.

“As this report shows, the first hit and worst affected are the world’s poorest groups, and yet they have done least to cause the problem.”

The report claims that 90 per cent of the deaths are related to gradual environmental degradation caused by a warming climate, which exacerbates existing threats—mainly malnutrition, diarrhoea and malaria. The rest are said to be the result of weather disasters.

Let me get this straight: 90 percent of the deaths that this study associates with climate change actually result from existing threats such as malnutrition, diarrhea, and malaria—in other words, from threats we generally associate with things like, you guessed it, hunger, disease, and poverty.

Now I’m all for protecting the environment, don’t get me wrong. But conflating climate change with hunger, disease, and poverty—and thereby with the deaths of 300,000 people per year and the suffering of “hundreds of millions of people worldwide”—is a pretty cheap way to advance your agenda, especially when those hundreds of millions of people would be better served by focusing our efforts on eliminating the things that actually make them suffer in the first place.