London/New York: US President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda, intended to expand fossil fuel and decimate efforts to reduce emissions, will substantially multiply deaths across the world due to climatic crises, an analysis by ProPublica and The Guardian found. What is noteworthy is that most of these deaths will be outside America.
According to the analysis report, most of those who are expected to die from increasing temperatures in the coming decades are those residing in poor and hot countries in Asia and Africa. When these countries are the least prepared for surging global temperatures, they emit little of the pollution that drives the Earth towards a climate crisis.
The analysis found that the extra greenhouse gases released in the next decade, stemming from Trump’s policies, are expected to kill 1.3 million more people worldwide in the eighty years after 2035. These are temperature-related deaths alone. Also, the actual number of people who die from heat will be much higher.
At the COP30 summit in Belem, Brazil, world leaders are gathered now to address the escalating effects of the climate crisis, but the absence of representatives from the US has been noted by the participants. This is when the US houses the world’s 4 per cent but produces 20 per cent of greenhouse gases.
Those other nations that are not attending the summit are Afghanistan, Myanmar and San Marino.
The Guardian says that their calculations use modelled estimates of the additional emissions that will be released due to Trump’s policies, along with peer-reviewed metrics for what is known as the mortality cost of carbon.
The heat-related deaths will be from heat strokes and exacerbation of existing illnesses. However, this does not include the massive expected deaths due to the broader effects of the climate crisis, including droughts, floods, wars, vector-borne diseases, hurricanes, wildfires and reduced crop yields, The Guardian says.