Climate change in Africa could leave 250 million more people short of water by 2020, spurring conflicts and threatening stability on the world's poorest continent, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner said on Tuesday.
Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations panel of climate experts who shared the prize with former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore last year, said the responsibility lay with wealthy developed nations to curb their carbon emissions.
"If the situation in Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world, then if the world has a conscience it has to remove that scar," Pachauri told Reuters in an interview.
"Reasons of equity and ethics clearly require that developed countries must do more and there is also an issue of enlightened self interest because you cannot have a large continent like Africa being neglected," he added, speaking on the sidelines of a U.N. trade and development conference in Ghana.
The Indian scientist warned that Africa's 1 billion people were among the most at risk from climate change because of the existing environmental pressures on the continent caused by lack of food and water, desertification and flash flooding.
"Unfortunately, the impact of climate is going to be most likely so harmful that it would threaten governments," he said.
"With water scarcity, the threat of conflict and the threat of competition for scarce resources will grow substantially and all of these are incompatible with good governance."
Pachauri, head of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, cited research showing that by 2020 between 75 million and 250 million people in Africa would be suffering from additional water stress due to climate change.
Farmers who depend on rain-fed agriculture were likely to see declines of 50 percent in their yields by 2020, he warned.
