Expert warns of climate change challenge

IRELAND WILL be less physically affected by climate change than other countries but will have to face global population shifts, demands for resources and a need for new ideas on how badly-affected regions can cope.

That is according to one of the world’s leading urban geographers Prof Brendan Gleeson, who has joined NUI Maynooth from Griffith University in Australia.

In his inaugural lecture on climate change last night, Prof Gleeson said none of the threats which had faced capitalism over the past 400 years had the “lethal potency” of the climate change danger.

Prof Gleeson said a drier and hotter climate would denude cities of their catchment areas while “more tempestuous weather patterns and rising sea levels” would give rise to more events like the breach of the levees in New Orleans.

Describing a world dominated by a global climate shift, with large numbers of people effectively climate refugees, Prof Gleeson said the new world would “be much less conducive to human existence”.

Contrasting his homeland of Australia with Ireland in the face of global warming, he said that while Australia figured highly in the Irish imagination as an economic refuge for young people, the continent was “already witness to record droughts, soaring average temperatures and plummeting catchments for the cities”.

Prof Gleeson, who also takes up a position as deputy director of the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis, said that cities, for so long considered part of the climate change problem, must now be seen as part of the solution.