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Poorer countries suffer the most despite contributing the least to carbon emissions

Ghana investing in fossil fuels is inconsistent and contradicts global efforts to stem climate change, environmental activists say.

This is according to new research conducted by an international team including the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the United Kingdom and is the first to study a link between cumulative carbon emissions and the frequency of hotter days.

The findings which are published in Environmental Research Letters show that the poorest fifth of the global population will be the first to experience more frequent heat extremes.

The team defined an 'extreme hot day' as occurring 0.1 per cent of the time in model simulations of the pre-industrial climate. It identified countries in the Horn of Africa such as Somalia and West Africa as the most likely to be worst affected.

According to Dr Manoj Joshi from UEA’s School of Environmental Sciences, geography was a major reason for this phenomenon with many poor countries in the tropics.

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"We know that low latitude regions have much less variability in day-to-day temperatures when compared with the mid-latitudes, which means the 'signal' of climate change emerges quite quickly, and because of this, the frequency of extreme hot days increases rapidly too.”

The research team used modern climate models to estimate cumulative CO2 emissions and subsequent changes to extreme local daily temperatures over the 20th and 21st centuries.

According to Dr Erich Fischer, “…the wealthiest countries will be able to cope with the impacts more easily than poorer nations. What [the] research [also] shows is that heat extremes do not increase evenly everywhere, but are becoming much more frequent for countries nearer the equator – these happen to be disproportionately poorer nations, including those in the Horn of Africa and West Africa.”

“In fact, this pattern was robust even when we considered future projections of population and income.”

Countries in the region are battling the gruelling effects of the El-Niño weather phenomenon which has caused drought and food shortage in Ethiopia and Zimbabwe. Small island states such as Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Jamaica and Fiji are also among some of the most vulnerable to climate change.

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Ghanaians have been experiencing unusually hotter days over the past few weeks and shorter rains.

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